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The Lion in His Den 


By the Same Author 


Livinc-Book in A Lavina AGE 





The Lion in His Den 


Books and Life 


BY 
LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 


W 


ASSOCIATION PRESS 


New York: 347 Mapison AVENUE 


1925 


Corrricut, 1925 


THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF 
Youne MeEn’s CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS 


Printed in the United States of America by 
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 


DEDICATED TO 


Tue Reverenp Frepertck Wituiam Norwoop, D.D. 
WHOSE MINISTRY AT THE CITY TEMPLE IN LONDON 
GIVES JOY AND PRIDE TO ALL HIS FRIENDS, 

AND INSPIRATION TO MULTITUDES OF MEN AND WOMEN 
ALL OVER THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/lioninhisdenseri00houg 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


INTRODUCING THE LION 
SIMPLIFICATION AND SINCERITY 
Tue GREEK SPIRIT 


A Minn Wuauicu Prosers 


A ScHOLAR AND A MAN or LETTERS . 


Mysticism AND CRITICISM . 


In Tueste Unitrep States 


A SrvENTEENTH CENTURY WorTHY . 


FAGB 


A PropHuet or Topay Wuo Has Nor 


ForGoTrEN YESTERDAY . 
AMERICAT AGAIN |) 05016), ou te 
A PRoPpHET AND AN ARTIST . 
A True Portrair. . . . 
One American MIND. . . 
CoMPLACENT CYNICISM . . 
SpraKING oF Mirrors. . . 


Tue Great ITALIAN .. . 


Tur CoRRELATION OF THE ARTS . 


Vil 


1 

: 8 
. 11 
. 15 
18 

23 

26 

31 

° 34 
° 38 
° 42 
AU 
° 51 
. 55 
. 58 
62 

66 


Vill 


CHAPTER 


XVITI 


XIX 
XX 
XXI 
XXII 
XXIII 
XXIV 
XXV 
XXVI 
XXVII 
XXVIII 
XXIX 
XXX 


XXXI 
XXXII 
XXXIII 
XXXIV 
XXXV 
XXXVI 
XXXVII 
XXXVIII 


ConTENTS 


CHRISTIANITY AND THE ARISTOCRACY 
or LETTERS . 


ReaDING PHILosoPpuHy . 

An AMERICAN IN LonDON 

A Great ScortisH PREACHER 
An American Nove.isr 

Tue Way or THE PREACHERS 
“THe Hieo Way” 
CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY 
Tue Romance or Maps 
Turee Litrte Books . 
SHERMAN OF ILLINOIs . 

A Brirp’s-Eve View or LITERATURE . 


Tue Girts oF THE CHURCH TO THE 
WorLp 


TastE AND DrmMocrRAcY 

MaAcHINES AND THE Man . 

SoNNETS OF THE Cross 

Tue Marrer or CHoice 
InrRopUCING THE WorRLD oF LETTERS 
More Asovut GREECE . 

Axsout Dr. Fospick 


Axsovut THE New PsycuHoroGcy 


PAGE 


CHAPTER 


XXXIX 
XL 
XLI 


XLII 


XLII 


XLIV 
XLV 
XLVI 
XLVII 


XLVIII 
XLIX 
L 


CONTENTS 


Tue Quest ror Unity AND Proaress 
Tue Leapersuip or Dr. CapMAN 


THe CHRISTIAN 
CHURCHES 


SPIRIT IN THE 


Tue Messaces oF THE CHURCHES FOR 
THE CHURCHES 


Mr. J. Sr. Lor Srracuery’s MIND at 
Pray . 


An Acutety Criticat Minp . 
Pau, THrovuecH CoNnTEMPORARY EYES 
A Great ORGAN oF CRITICISM 


A Boox or Far-ReacuHine SIGNIFI- 
CANCE 


A ViraL PERSONALITY Aero shane) 
CoNSCIENCE AND TASTE 


GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH THE RE- 
PUBLIC 


History As INTERPRETATION. . 


AL QUInp LVENING( cies) oil isi iintsraare 


164 


169 


173 
176 


179}: 


183 


186 
190 
193 


196 
200 
203 





WITH THE READER 


The Lion first appeared in The Christian Cen- 
tury. And it has been a great happiness to know 
that he made friends all about the United States. 

Many of the chapters herewith published, how- 
ever, see the light for the first time in this book. 
The discerning reader will not be misled by the 
brevity of the conversations. What is really at- — 
tempted is of course a criticism of life expressed 
in epigrams and not in weighty and sententious 
dissertations. And now that it is all done the 
Lion looks at one wistfully and makes his own 
the words of the little girl in Sir James Barrie’s 
“Dear Brutus”’—‘I don’t want to be a might 
have been.” And I reply in all seriousness, “My 
dear Lion, the best I can do for my children is 
to let them live in books.” 

1 D5 Geel 





THE LION IN HIS DEN 


CHAPTER I 
IntTRopucING THE Lion 


HE Lion was just saying—but I am for- 
4h getting that you do not know the Lion. 
He went to the college of liberal arts 

of a certain great university as John Melton 
Harper. His career as an athlete every college 
man knows. His brilliant work in his classes is 
remembered a bit wistfully by many a quiet pro- 
fessor who is giving his life to the tasks of tech- 
nical scholarship. THis social charm swept every- 
thing before it. And it was about the beginning 
of his junior year that he received the name by 
which all his friends know him. From that time 
he was “The Lion.” And so it has been ever 
since. The one football game of his senior year 
which marks the climax of his athletic achievement 
is still the subject of yarns which old grads tell, 
and no freshman with a body as well as a mind 


is allowed to forget it. He used to slip away in 
1 


9 Tuer Lion 1x His DEn 





the summer with great bundles of books and so in 
vigorous outdoor life and in wide reading his 
vacations were passed. 

After his graduation he was at Oxford for a 
year. Then he matriculated im the graduate 
school of the American Institution which does 
most notable work in research and in due time 
received his doctor’s degree, majoring in history. 
A month after that the accident occurred. And 
in a few weeks his friends knew that all his life 
he would be an invalid with no hope of recovery. 
The time might come when he could sit up occa- 
sionally in an easy chair. But he would never 
walk again and he would never be capable of work 
which taxed the little remnant of vitality which 
was left to him. The first months were full of 
rebellion and terrible struggle. He said no hard 
or bitter word. But you could see that the fight 
was raging as you looked into his eyes. Then 
came the first indications that he had won his big- 
gest battle. The old light gradually came back 
to his eyes. The shrewd whimsical mirth played 
about his speech and the day came when this help- 
less invalid gave you the impression of being more 
virile than most of the men you meet upon the 
street. ‘The vigor and masterful energy of his 
mind seemed to grow rather than to decrease. 

More and more he was able to read the books 





INTRODUCING THE LIon 3 


for which he cared, and that meant a range as 
wide as human interest goes. And gradually it 
became possible for him to write a little and to 
talk with some of his friends every day. Every 
few years a book has come from his pen. And 
the world of scholarship has recognized, their 
technical adequacy and their ripe human charm. 
But his talk has not been recorded. And it is 
here that he is really revealed. He sits, as it were, 
a little apart from life with the perspective of 
struggle, the insight of suffering, and the outlook 
which moral and spiritual victory give. But he 
keeps all his hearty zest for every gripping vigor- 
ous activity. He admits he still plays football. 
Only now he plays football with his mind. He 
lives at the heart of the world. Yet he has a 
poise and spiritual serenity of which this tense 
and overwrought age knows all too little. 

Well, as I began, the Lion was saying: 

“I'd like to take H. G. Wells and Paul Shorey 
and rub them together until I made one man out 
of the two.” 

“They would both resist the process,” I 
laughed. 

“That’s just the point,” chuckled the Lion, “Of 
course they would both resist it and yet it is pre- 
cisely what each one of them needs. If Wells 
had the high humanistic spirit of fifth century 


4A Tue Lion 1n His Den 


Athens it would make a new man of him. He 
misses every defining thing in the treatment of 
the fifth century in his Outline. And if Professor 
Shorey could look out on the world with eyes 
which glowed with the dreams of Wells it would 
be like Athens and New York joining in a promis- 
ing and noble wedlock.” 

“That’s just the trouble with you, Old Man,” 
I broke in, “you are all the while trying to join 
things which cannot be united. I believe if you 
had been Noah you would have tried to bring each 
beast into the ark in the particular company of 
its most deadly antipathy.” 

The Lion was suddenly serious. 

“Don’t take the wrong train out of the big 
station,” he said, “you are heading for the wrong 
destination. If you stop to think for a moment 
you will see that as a rule every man’s interpreta- 
tion of life needs to be supplemented by some 
element in the view which he dislikes the most. 
It is only when we learn from our foes that we 
become really good fighters.” 

‘“There’s a difference between learning from our 
foes and becoming our foes,” I objected. “I 
don’t want to be rubbed into the man who is my 
favorite aversion until I become a part of him.” 

“You are forgetting that in the meantime he 
will become a part of you,” replied my friend. 


INTRODUCING THE LIoN 5 


“And perhaps each of us will surrender the 
best instead of the worst of ourselves. Then how 
will you like the combination?” 

“T hope you won’t do that,” said the Lion, “but 
if you do, the result will be a man who has at least 
ceased to be plausible. As it is, each of you capi- 
talizes his insights m getting a hearing for his 
mistakes. If only the worst of both survive it will 
stand out for exactly what it is. And there is 
always the possibility that the best will unite and 
neutralize the worst and in that case you have 
done something for your country. You had 
better go and look up your favorite antipathy. 
He can do more for you than your best friend.” 

“But about Wells—” I interjected. 

“Wells,” said my friend oracularly, “Wells is 
mind divorced from moral struggle. He would 
be the greatest possible teacher for a world of 
clear and easy intellectual levels. There are no 
heights of awful aspiration. There are no terrible 
depths down which you gaze with shuddering awe. 
If you try to read Wells after reading Dante or 
even after reading Carlyle you know well what I 
mean. He is crisp and nimble and he has the cool 
audacity of a mathematical mind. He has his own 
fine eloquence. But his Utopia would be the 
urbane home of depleted personalities. ‘The Greek 
tragedies gave you abysmal gloom. But they 





6 Tue Lron 1n His Den 





gave you life infinitely rich in the experience 
which bends the personality to great issues. There 
is a mathematical modern Heaven where you have 
to pay for happiness by being eternally common- 
place.” 

“But surely you don’t mean to accuse Wells of 
that sort of thing?” I enquired. 

“Of just that,” said the Lion. “His bright 
originality has all its quality of agile energy be- 
cause you see it against the background of a 
richer world which he assumes but which he could 
not keep alive. If you think your way into a 
world dominated only by the principles and the 
relationships which belong to his mind in the 
messianic period of his writing you will see that 
such a world would be unthinkably dull. His 
dream of brotherhood is a great dream. But it 
must be realized along the path of a personal life 
whose moral and spiritual richness he does not 
even suspect. Now the fifth century Greek trage- 
dies could teach him—” 

“Why not the first century Prophet?” I broke 
in. 

“As for that,” said my friend, “Wells is too 
busy with one or two principles of the first cen- 
tury Prophet ever to have seen his life or his 
teachings as a whole. He is so busy with a couple 
of leaves that he has never seen the tree. And 


INTRODUCING THE LION 4 


the two or three leaves he knows are not enough 
for the healing of the nations.” 

Then I had to go. And the Lion lay back 
quietly in bed. I wondered if I had allowed him 
to talk too much. You never can remember that 


he is ill. 


CHAPTER II 
SIMPLIFICATION AND SINCERITY 


** & RE you not sometimes baffied by politics,” 
A asked the Lion. 
“I am sometimes baffled by politicians,” 
I threw back at him. 

“Oh, they are not bafflmg,” said the Lion. 
“They are keeping in office by shrewdly studying 
their constituency. They are big boys who want 
to speak at the school exhibition and carefully 
cultivate those who will select the speakers. Poli- 
ticlans are rather simple and primitive people. 
It is only politics which are really complex.” 

“Do you think they are really as simple as 
that?” I asked, trying to bring my friend from 
banter to seriousness. 

“Oh, not quite so simple as that. But quite 
truly the politician is not an intellectual problem. 
He is a psychological problem. Sometimes he is 
a psychopathic problem. On the other hand poli- 
tics is one of the most searching forms of mental 
discipline of which quite often the politician 


knows just nothing at all.” 
8 


SIMPLIFICATION AND SINCERITY 9 


‘And what baffles you at the moment in the life 
of this robust young Republic?” 

“The battle between simplification and sincer- 
ity,” replied the Lion sententiously. 

“Well, that is rather a mouthful,” I retorted. 
“Suppose you illumine my dull mind by giving 
me a hint as to what you may possibly mean.” 

“It’s this way,” said the Lion, with a fascinat- 
ing little pucker on his brow. “In the days when 
a great issue arises everything tends to simplifica- 
tion. ‘The whole country takes sides. You are 
for or against. And the subject can be discerned 
in clear, large ways. There are two great parties. 
And each amply develops and urges one of the 
two possible positions. The fighting may wax 
very hot. There may be much bitter feeling. But 
there is a certain intellectual satisfaction in a 
survey of the relatively simple way in which the 
lines are drawn.” 

The Lion rubbed his hands together for a mo- 
ment as if he generated ideas by a process of fric- 
tion. Then he went on. 

“But in a great country like ours with its vast 
stretches of territory and its varieties of race 
and interest and occupation, the actual division 
becomes infinitely complex. And except in an 
hour of crisis in relation to some commanding 
issue all these interests begin to clamor for poli- 


10 Tuer Lion 1n His Dew 


tical expression. The labor group, the agricul- 
tural group, the native group, the newly natura- 
lized group, the black group, the group of a 
particular religious affiliation—all these become 
articulate. The politician tears his hair in frenzy. 
How is he to get all these people divided into two 
parties in such a way that his own will win? Every 
plank in his platform is in danger of alienating 
three groups for every two it wins. Simplifica- 
tion fights sincerity. For if by an artificial pro- 
cess you can simplify the issues you can perfect 
your party organization and get through an elec- 
tion even if you do not succeed in doing any- 
thing else.” 

“Do you think that 1t would be good for these 
United States to have as many parties as there 
are diverse groups?” I asked. 

The Lion looked up whimsically. 

“T began this conversation by asking you if 
you did not find politics baffling,” he said. 


CHAPTER III 
Tue GREEK SPIRIT 


HE Lion was in one of his restlessly con- 

tented moods. I know the phrase seems 

the most definite sort of contradiction. But 
there is a certain mood of restless energy of 
thought and feeling which gives the Lion such 
satisfaction that any one of his friends would 
recognize just what I mean by calling it a mood of 
restless content. 

“T have just been talking with a boy who 
wanted to know something about the Greek 
spirit,” he said. 

It was clear that something lay behind the 
remark and so I waited. 

My friend smiled whimsically. 

“He has just graduated from one of those 
green-apple colleges which give a man a certain 
amount of mental discipline and leave him woe- 
fully ignorant of most of the mighty adventures 
of the spirit of man. He made a flippant remark 
about the Greeks. It was all so characteristic of 


the omniscience of the empty mind that I turned 
11 


12 Tuer Lion 1n His Den 


upon him wrathfully. I hurled facts at him like 
bullets. He stood beside me a little dazed while 
the onslaught was going on. At last he said, ‘I 
never knew the Greeks were that sort of people. 
Where can I find out more about them?’ ” 

I laughed aloud at that. 

“It must have been a case of very sudden con- 
version,” I said. ‘And what did you tell him to 
read?” 

The Lion chuckled a little. 

“It wasn’t really so sudden. This chap knows 
a good deal about certain aspects of modern 
science. So I began by telling him what the 
scientific mind owes to Greece. It was all per- 
fectly new to him. And he has at least the respect 
for facts which scientific training gives to a 
student. What did I tell him to read? Well, of 
course there was only one book with which to 
begin. That is that fine collection of studies on 
“The Legacy of Greece,” edited by R. W. Living- 
stone. That will put him right about the relation 
of the Greeks to science and will start him with 
a number of other things. Then I told him to 
read Livingstone’s book, “The Greek Genius and 
Its Meaning for Us,” and that memorable volume 
of lectures by Professor Butcher, “The Original- 
ity of Greece.” When he has read those books, if 
he has it in him to suspect what they are about, he 


Tur GREEK SPIRIT 13 


will go on until he really discovers the meaning of 
Greece for the life of the world.” 

We were silent for a moment. Then my friend 
went on. 

“Really I am fairly startled by the illiteracy of 
a good many college graduates. The abysmal 
ignorance of the fashion in which the human 
spirit has moved out on its long journey among 
the forces of nature and among the possibilities 
of human relationships and in the vast quest for 
God fairly astounds me. Even in scientific mat- 
ters our typical college boy hasn’t a glimmer of 
the history of scientific achievement. He does 
not know science as a human adventure. And 
that is the knowledge without which all other 
scientific attaimment is incapable of becoming 
fully fruitful. A large proportion of these fine 
lads just out of college who come to see me do not 
even know what sort of thing it would be to enter 
upon the cultivation of the intellectual life. I 
wonder sometimes what would happen if the in- 
tellectual life should be made a student activity 
upon the campus of one of our universities.” 

The Lion looked at me with a sort of humorous 
defiance in his eye. 

“You are still wanting to transplant Oxford to 
America,” I suggested. 

“No, I do not want to transplant Oxford. I 


14 Tuer Lion 1n His DEN 





want to see America develop the equivalent of 
Oxford in the terms of its own experience and 
life.” 

“Perhaps that is just what it is doing,” I re- 
plied. 

“What it is doing,” declared the Lion, “is to 
substitute technical knowledge for erudition and 
the capacity to classify materials for the power 
to appreciate which is the product of ripe and 
mellow culture. It is falling a victim to the age 
of machinery. It is producing a good many 
graduates who are not only innocent of culture 
but who are incapable of culture.” 

“And so you are going to send your friends 
back to Athens. What do you expect them to 
carry into America when they return?” 

The eyes of my friend kindled. 

“IT expect them to bring the wide moving curio- 
sity of a really awakened mind. I expect them to 
know the difference between facts and living 
knowledge. I expect them to have a dawning 
sense of harmony and proportion. I expect them 
to be able to distinguish between machinery and 
personality. I expect—” 

But just here I was called to the telephone and 
so the conversation ended for the day. 


CHAPTER IV 
A Minn Wuicu Propes 


HE other afternoon I ran in to say 

““sood-by” to my friend before starting off 

for Europe. ‘There was a touch of wist- 
fulness in his steady eyes as we talked of the 
ocean and the old world, and I turned the conver- 
sation into other channels as quickly as I could 
make the change without arousing his suspicion. 

Two books were lying beside him on the bed. 
Both were by Bishop Francis J. McConnell. One 
was “Living Together.” 'The other was “Is God 
Limited?” ‘The Lion followed my eyes as they 
rested upon these books. 

“Yes, I have been back with Bishop McConnell 
again,’ he said. “Do you know I have read 
every one of his books? And for years I have 
followed his more incidental writings with the 
greatest interest. ‘There is a world of remorseless 
honesty always, and there is a power of analysis 
which fairly startles one at times. And back 
of it all there is a wealth of simple, true feeling 


which simply will not be shut up in the forms of 
15 


16 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 


logic. But the feeling never gets into the saddle. 
The shrewd sense of life’s incongruities and of the 
inconsistencies of thought and action always pre- 
vents that. But back of the most cutting sar- 
casm, the wells of feeling remain and they enrich 
every activity of this able and dauntless Bishop.” 

“I remember that you were very keen about his 
leadership in the Inter-Church imvestigation of 
the Steel Trust,” I remarked. 

The face of the Lion brightened at the memory. 

“Yes it was a great thing to have his sort of 
man at the head of it. He is a veritable incarna- 
tion of poise and brain power, a man with capa- 
city for infinite care in investigation and a man 
who simply cannot be stampeded. 

“And how he keeps his eyes on the important 
problem. Take this book ‘Living Together.’? You 
face the problems of church unity, of the church 
and labor, of the saving of patriotism, of better 
terms with science, and of the rising tides of 
color. The very subjects give you a picture of 
our contemporary situation. And with what 
trenchant power the questions are discussed.” 

The Lion picked up the volume, “Is God 
Limited?” 

“Under everything else Bishop McConnell has 
the mind of a philosopher. And it is good to 
have him lifting philosophical issues again. Re- 


A Minn Wuicu Prospes ty 


lativity, Law, Evolution, and searching meta- 
physical matters are discussed by a mind which 
flashes like a sharp sword. Then from philoso- 
phical principles you are led into the discussion 
of prayer, immortality, racial antipathy, and a 
world of current matters. ‘Then this virile thinker 
leads you to a final consideration of the divine 
personality and the ultimate place of Christ. It 
is a great thing to get a sound metaphysical basis 
under the social passion.” 

I hurried off soon after that but I thought of 
a number of good books which are somehow thin 
for all their goodness and I repeated the Lion’s 
phrase “a sound metaphysical basis for the social 
passion.” 


CHAPTER VY 
A ScHOLAR AND A Man or Lerrers 


HE Lion was holding a book in his hand. 
a Bending over beside him I read the title: 

“Letters of Principal James Denney to 
W. Robertson Nicoll 1893-1917.” My friend was 
gazing at the portrait of Dr. Denney opposite the 
title page of the book. It revealed a strong, severe 
face, the face of a student and scholar. But it 
did not tell the secret of the vital tang of the 
author’s style nor did it hint the presence of a 
low-burning humor or the play of dark-gleaming 
wit. 

“Tt was easy to misunderstand Denney. And it 
was easy to underestimate him,” began the Lion. 
“Think of a theologian who was able to say that 
if the historical plays of Shakespeare were lost 
he could repeat them from memory. Think of a 
stern Scottish professor replying to a friend who 
had suggested that you must be under twenty to 
get a real taste of Byron, by saying ‘Yes, but, 
Byron has something for us even in the sixties,’ 


and then humorously refusing to state what it was. 
18 


A ScHouarR AND A Man or Letters 19 


Men were likely to get a sense from afar of Dr. 
Denney’s extremely conservative theological posi- 
tion and then never come to appreciate the ripe- 
ness of his scholarship of the keenness and elasti- 
city of his mind.” 

My friend looked across the room to where 
several volumes of Principal Denney’s stood on 
one of the shelves. 

“YT began with ‘Studies in Theology,’ ” he said. 
“And oddly enough it was the standing ground 
they gave for a man who wanted to accept the 
general position of modern critical scholarship 
which first gripped me. Then the clear and cogent 
way in which the author made a way for the 
understanding of how men who had never heard 
of Christ met in their own fashion an opportunity 
for moral and spiritual decision greatly helped me 
as to a matter which had caused me some burnings 
of heart. The publication of ‘The Death of 
Christ’ found me in a receptive mood. Some par- 
ticularly searching experience of struggle and 
defeat had made me ready for the almost terrible 
moral realism which gives tone to this New Testa- 
ment study. Frankly, I accepted Dr. Denney’s 
interpretation the more readily because the Christ 
who speaks from the cross had come to have in 
my own life just the sort of place which the au- 
thor was so sure critical study would reveal as 


20 Tue Lion 1x His DEn 


belonging to Him in the New Testament and in 
His own consciousness. I dipped into his other 
books and read carefully his posthumous volume 
of lectures. His daring criticism always roused 
and stimulated me. His literary style with all its 
pungent energy held my mind at sharp attention. 
And his central message as to the meaning of the 
cross has always spoken deeply to me.” 

“A good many men have found Denney the 
author of hard sayings,” I interjected. 

“TY do not mean at all that he seems to me a 
complete and well-rounded Christian thinker,” 
replied the Lion. ‘Occasionally one finds a metal- 
lic quality in his thinking which hardly suggests 
that he is in contact with reality. He never speaks 
of the mystical side of Christianity in words 
which satisfy me. And I am afraid he was so 
much taken up with the thought of the madequa- 
cies of some men’s presentation of the social 
aspects of Christianity that the great tidal move- 
ment of our time in Christian things was never 
viewed by him with understanding sympathy. He 
had one great and mastering word to say and he 
said it with memorable power. And while I must 
go to many other men for many other things I 
think I must say quite simply that I think his 
fundamental word was a true word.” 


A ScHOLAR AND A Man or Letters 21 


I was by this time holding the volume of letters 
in my hand, “What about these?” I asked. 

“T have read them with constant relish,” re- 
plied my friend. “There are pages of good talk 
about books and Dr. Denney writes more freely 
or at least with an easier frankness of expression 
in his letters than would be possible in a more 
formal statement. All sorts of books on the New 
Testament and in respect of the interpretation of 
Christianity pass before our notice. There is 
many a glimpse into the study of a busy scholar 
and in spite of the reticence there is many a quick 
revelation of a very noble and responsive heart. 
It is good writing and there are very telling bits 
of criticism and very discriminating bits of com- 
ment. Take this (the book was now again in the 
hands of the Lion) : ‘Most people will agree with 
what you say about theological colleges making 
believers uncomfortable, but I am not sure that 
burning is the cure. I fancy it must be establish- 
ing a more intimate connection between them and 
the life and work of the church.’ Or at a deeper 
level take this: ‘It needs the whole of the New 
Testament to show what Christ is, and the man 
only deceives himself when he goes behind Chris- 
tianity, and exhibits the historical Jesus as a 
figure which could never have created Christianity 
at all.’ Or in an entirely different vein take this: 


aed Tue Lion 1n His Den 


‘The only man of whom Wesley reminds me is 
B. Franklin. They have the same relentless prac- 
ticality and effectiveness in their minds and some- 
thing of the same kind of limitation.2 To me 
one of the most interesting things in the whole 
volume of letters was this: ‘I had (Kirsopp) Lake 
staying with me, and much as I dislike his opinions 
I took to the man very much. He said my review 
in the British Weekly was the only serious review 
his book had.’ It is wonderfully interesting to 
think of Dr. Denney and Professor Lake talking 
together in this intimate and friendly way. Al- 
together I like the letters so well that I shall read 
them again. And that means more than adjec- 
tives. Sometimes you throw an author an adjec- 
tive in order to get rid of him. If you go back 
to his book for a second reading it means that it 
really has something for you.” 


CHAPTER VI 
Mysticism AND CRITICISM 


T was at the close of a busy day. I dropped 

I in upon the Lion hoping for an evening of 

gay and merry talk about the light and inci- 
dental matters of literature. But I found my 
friend’s mind full of thoughts about Old Testa- 
ment history and criticism. And concerning these 
things he would talk. 

“Tt seems a good many years now,” he began, 
“since I first became interested in Old Testament 
scholarship. I think the death of Professor A. B. 
Davidson, of Edinburgh, in 1902, was really the 
beginning. The British Weekly contained an 
astonishing series of articles of appreciation of 
the great teacher. And from these articles I went 
on to read the writings of Davidson and 
W. Robertson Smith and Driver and George 
Adam Smith and the others. It opened up a new 
world to me. The chapter on ‘The Sin Against 
Love,’ in George Adam Smith’s interpretation of 
Hosea in “The Book cf the Twelve,’ was almost 


an epoch in my life.” 
23 


24 Tuer Lion 1x His DEN 


The Lion lay quite still for a moment. Then, 
with a deep and shining light in his eye, he said, 
“Do you remember the sentence Sir George Adam 
Smith flashed out in one of his lectures on Jere- 
miah delivered in America years ago—the sen- 
tence, ‘Jeremiah reminds you of one of those 
shells whose shriek is heard above the noise of 
battle and whose very mission is performed in its 
explosion.” That sort of thing brings the dead 
past to life, doesn’t it?” 

My friend put his hand on some books which 
lay within reach. 

“YT went through the volumes of Kent’s ‘Histori- 
cal Bible’ recently with constant appreciation of 
their industrious scholarship, their sympathy, and 
their daring treatment of the materials. Then I 
fell to wanting to go through a new ‘Old Testa- 
ment Introduction.’ Driver’s treatment of that 
task had been my last experience. I chanced to 
read an announcement that the last two volumes 
of Professor Frederick Carl LEiselen’s four- 
volume ‘Old Testament Introduction’ had just 
come from the press. I ordered the four, and 
what a good time I have been having! Professor 
Eiselen has considered all the problems. He 
marshals all the authorities. He is open minded, 
but he is never easily swept off his feet. He has 
a really judicial mind. And he writes in a fashion 


MystTIicisM AND CRITICISM 95 


which disarms prejudice and must appeal even 
to the reader who approaches modern methods 
with hesitation and dislike. He carries a vast 
amount of scholarship without self-consciousness 
and with a certain simplicity of mind in which 
I found much pleasure. He clears the field and 
a man is ready to go on thinking and brooding 
and appropriating the old Testament’s inspira- 
tions feeling that all his work is done in the light 
of what is really going on in Old Testament 
Scholarship.” 

“There you have let out the secret of your 
method,” I broke in. ‘You will have your hours 
of brooding appropriation of the great words of 
the Bible. But you must think as a scholar 
before you brood as a mystic.” 

“Why not?” asked the Lion. “We shall attend 
the nuptials of mysticism and criticism one of 
these days. And a great wedding it will be.” 

The Lion is always bringing together things 
people have kept in different compartments of 
their minds, and when he does, I go off to think 
it over by myself. as I. did the other night. 


CHAPTER VII 
In Turse Unirep States 


HE Lion owned a comfortable cottage by 

the sea and here he spent most of his sum- 

mers. The matter of travel was always a 
painful and trying experience, but this virile in- 
valid insisted upon taking certain journeys in 
spite of the suffering they involved. He was al- 
ways particularly bright and keen when traveling. 
Then you were sure to see what I once called his 
“‘soldier’s smile.” He flushed a little angrily 
when I used this phrase and I never brought it 
out in his presence again. 

This particular afternoon he was lying on a 
couch by an open window overlooking the Atlantic. 
Beside him was a table with the usual assortment 
of books and papers and magazines. There was 
a little sparkle in my friend’s eye as I entered 
the room. He went at once to the subject in 
his mind, as was his way. 

“T’ve just finished reading William E. Dodd’s 
book on Woodrow Wilson,” he began. ‘This 
professor in the University of Chicago has done a 


notable piece of work.” 
26 


In THest Unirep STATEs Ot 





He held the book in his hand, turning the pages 
easily for a moment. Then he went on. 

“Professor Dodd is a man of the South with the 
instincts and attitude of a southern gentleman. 
He is a democrat whose democracy is deep in his 
blood. He is a man of social enthusiasm, awake 
to all the fresher currents of contemporary life 
and thought. His style is direct and energetic. 
There is very little charm of phrase, and there 
is no subtle or delicate coloring in the writing of 
paragraphs. But he has a story to tell. He has 
made a long and careful and industrious and 
scientific investigation. And he tells the story 
with conviction and with power.” 

Once again my friend waited a moment. Then 
his voice became a bit more vibrant. 

“What a story it is!” he said. “This tale of a 
man who dared to take the ideals of a Presbyterian 
parsonage into the councils of the nation. It 
is the story of the greatest dream which has been 
dreamed in our time, and he found the dream in 
the New Testament.” 

“*One man with a dream at pleasure, 
Can go forth to conquer a crown, 


And two with a new made measure, 
Can trample an empire down.’ ” 


I quoted. The Lion listened with friendly sym- 
pathy to the familiar words. 


98 Tue Lion 1x His Den 


“But he didn’t conquer a crown, unless it was 
a crown of thorns,” he said. 

“And why did everything go wrong at last?” 
I asked. 

“That’s what Professor Dodd’s book tells you,” 
replied the Lion. “At least he tells you a part 
of it. And you have a better understanding of 
the story of our own times in America, and of 
many a subtle relationship of European politics 
when you have finished the book. Against what 
odds Wilson fought! He was crushed between 
the partisan politicians at home and the sordid 
diplomats of Europe. But it was a magnificent 
failure. It was the sort of failure men cannot 
forget. Wilson will capture men’s imaginations. 
He will haunt their consciences. He will keep 
coming into their minds. And because they can- 
not forget, some day they will set about doing the 
thing for which he gave his health and almost 
gave his life.” 

Fresh breezes were blowing in from the ocean 
while we talked. 

I picked another volume from the table. It 
was Paul Haworth’s “History of the United States 
in Our Own Times.” 

‘You are going in for contemporary America 
rather vigorously,” I observed. 

“It’s a good piece of writing,” replied the Lion. 


In Tuese Unirep STATES 29 


“You get a very intimate view of the development 
of the United States from the close of the Civil 
War to the close of the European conflict. There 
is a particularly clear and cogent account of the 
social and economic development through which 
we have been passing. There is more to be said. 
But this book gives you more than most Ameri- 
‘cans have clearly in their minds. Id like to have 
every leader of men and of movements in this 
country read it. And if people on the other side 
of the sea could be persuaded to read it they would 
understand us better?” 

The Lion moved his head a little impatiently on 
his pillow. 

“Most Americans know very little about Amer1- 
can history,” he said. ‘A man ought to read 
Wilson’s exquisitely written ‘History of the 
American People,’ with its clear and luminous 
picture of Europe in the background all the while. 
He ought to read Rhodes’ volumes about the 
period when we approached our greatest conflict, 
the period of its waging, and the period of its 
aftermath. Then he ought to read Haworth’s 
book to see the rise of new problems, and Dodd’s 
biography for the stage setting of our own day.” 

As I walked away from the house along the 
shore I thought a little wistfully of this meditative 


30: Tue Lion 1xn His DEN 


invalid living over the past of our nation and 
peering forward to decipher its future. After 
all, a busy, active man could also find time to read 
and to think if he really set himself about it, 


CHAPTER VIII 
A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY WorTHY 


HE Lion is very proud of his Scottish 
blood. Not that he talks about it. He is 
too proud to talk about it. It is probably 
true that all profound natures find it a baffling 
thing to make connections between their deepest 
feelings and their words. At any rate if you 
want to know how the Lion feels about Scotland 
you must watch his eyes. I told him this once 
and he replied that he kept Scotland not on the 
tip of his tongue but in the bottom of his heart. 
The other day I came upon him with the second 
series of that fine work “The Evangelical Succes- 
sion” in his hand. You may remember that in the 
years from 1882 to 1884 that powerful minister 
Alexander Whyte secured the services of many 
men eminent in scholarship and theology to dis- 
cuss each one figure belong to that stately line 
of Christian leaders denominated the Evangelical 
Succession. This notable series is out of print 
but the Lion found them in a second-hand book 
store on one of his trips to London before his 


dark day, and now he goes back to the series 
31 


32 Tue Lion 1s His Den 


once in a while with a relish which never seems 
to fail. 

“T have been reading about Alexander Hender- 
son,” he declared, holding the open book toward 
my outstretched hand. I saw by the light in his 
eye that his mind and his heart were in the land 
of the heather and that he was marching in spirit 
to the music of its heroic days. 

“TI can hear the bagpipes playing,” I said whim- 
sically, as I held the book quietly in my hand. 

‘“Man, but Henderson was a leader!” the Lion 
was saying enthusiastically. ‘“‘Poised and urbane, 
with a heart of fire under his quiet exterior. A 
great master of assemblies in the literal sense of 
the word. A keen mind united to a dauntless 
loyalty. You could trust him to see through the 
cleverest bit of subterfuge. A diplomat who 
could meet Charles the First on his own ground, 
playing his sincerity against the King’s duplicity 
and insincerity. A scholar whose years in a 
country parish had ripened a pastor’s heart while 
they had burnished the mind of a man of learning. 
A nation is safe if its country churches hide some- 
where men of the kidney of Henderson. And all 
the while he moved without dizziness or confusion 
in the high places of the earth because his heart 
was not in them but in the invisible court of the 
King of Kings.” 


A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY WortTHy 33 


“Seventeenth Century Scotland and England 
have been living in your mind today,” I said, 
when the Lion paused for a moment. 

His eyes were shining as he went on. 

‘You should watch Henderson in the day of 
the great Covenant in 1637. You should watch 
the overthrow of a tyrannical church which had 
been forced upon the nation by tyrannical Kings. 
You should sense the quiet dignity and the power 
of it. And Henderson stands at the very centre 
of those great achievements.” 

“Do you suppose there are great men of Hen- 
derson’s spirit in country churches in this Repub- 
lic?” I asked. 

The Lion was silent for a while. Then he said 
slowly, “That question makes me want to ask a 
great many others.” 


CHAPTER IX 


A Propnet or Topay Wuo Has Nor For- 
GOTTEN YESTERDAY 


us HY did we let him go?” asked the 
Lion. 
“Do you think we were really ready 
for him?” I countered. 

We were speaking of Dr. John Kelman who 
had resigned the pastorate of the Fifth Avenue 
Presbyterian Church in New York City to accept 
the pastorate of Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian 
Church in Frognal, a part of that fine suburb of 
London, which in general knows the name Hamp- 
stead. 

The Lion was lying quietly in what I could sur- 
mise was a mood of memories. And soon my guess 
was verified. 

“IT remember how I began with Dr. Kelman,” 
he said, “Somehow I came across his book on 
Robert Louis Stevenson. Later I learned that 
a great authority had called it the first book in 
which Stevenson really lived. I read the book 
with a kind of bright happiness. It kept saying 

34 


A Propuet Wuo Has Not Forcotten 35 


those things about Stevenson which indicated un- 
derstanding, insight, and sympathy. You felt 
that it was the sort of book Stevenson himself 
would have been glad to have someone write about 
him. Then I picked up “Among Famous Books.” 
It had all the marks of the true book lover. There 
was ardor, there was comprehension, there was 
individual taste. And there was not a little criti- 
cal ability. I was in Edinburgh and heard Dr. 
Kelman at Free Saint George’s when he was first 
colleague then successor of that mighty man Dr. 
Alexander Whyte. I also heard him at one of 
those meetings to which he drew Edinburgh’s 
young men, speaking to them with an allurement 
and a potency not matched since the days of 
Henry Drummond. His two volumes interpreting 
‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ were a revelation to me. I 
had not supposed that Bunyan could be translated 
into the language of Matthew Arnold. But here 
it was done. Dr. Kelman set the great Evangelical 
talking Greek. The book “Things Eternal” gave 
me a new definition of devotional writing. 'The 
Yale lectures on preaching combined the passion 
of the war with many a bit of wise and effective 
suggestion about preaching spoken out of the 
mind and heart of a man to whom the university 
of experience had given a higher degree than any 
he had received in the schools. The book dealing 


36 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 


with international Christianity reminded me of 
the varied experience which had make Dr. Kel- 
man a cosmopolitan in sympathy as well as a 
proud citizen of the British Empire. ‘Three 
Prophets of Yesterday and their Message for 'To- 
day’ came from the very centre of his own life. 
For in him the Hebrew and the Greek had con- 
tended. And in him too there had been wrought 
out a synthesis—even as in the Victorian age he 
saw a literary example of Hegelian dialectic: 
Thomas Carlyle—Hebrew,—the Thesis; Matthew 
Arnold—Greek, the Antithesis; Robert Browning 
—Christian, the Synthesis. For deeper than any- 
thing else to Dr. Kelman is the fact that Chris- 
tianity reconciles the Hebrew and the Greek ele- 
ments in a higher unity. When Jesus said ‘Ye 
are the salt of the earth,’ He was a Hebrew think- 
ing of preservation from moral decay. When He 
said ‘Ye are the light of the world,’ He was a 
Greek thinking of moral and spiritual illumina- 
tion. But He said both. And He transcended 
both in the very moment when He included the 
deepest message of each. Something like that is 
the gospel of John Kelman. Once again I ask, 
‘Why did we let him go?’ 

“Well, to use your own figure,” I replied, “‘we 
know something of the Hebrew note. I am afraid 
we know all too little of the Greek note. Do you 


A ProrpHet Wuo Has Not Forcotrren 37 


think we are really ready for the prophet of the 
higher unity ?”—and without waiting for the Lion 
to reply, I added the last word of this particular 
conversation. 

“At any rate I am glad to think of him at the 
centre of the English-speaking world speaking 
his great word of interpretation. Hampstead 1s 
not really far from anywhere in London if you 
are really hungry for Dr. Kelman’s message. The 
people who are ready for him will find their way 
to Frognal. And the lines of his influence will 
continue to move quietly but surely out to the 
very ends of the earth?” 





CHAPTER X 


AMERICA AGAIN 


HERE were two books beside my friend’s 

bed on the little table the other day when 

I entered his room. One was Paul L. 

Haworth’s “United States in Our Own Times.” 

The other was Frederic L. Paxson’s ““Recent His- 

tory of the United States.” I picked them up 

rather idly but soon became interested following 

the individual markings which showed the trail of 

the mind of the Lion as he had gone through these 
books. 

“Better fifty years of America—” I began to 
paraphrase with scant regard to accent or rhythm, 
when the Lion interrupted me. 

“Tt really is better,” he declared. ‘“‘You read 
the story with a good deal of amazement even 
though you have lived through it. The terrific 
speed of the thing fairly startles you. Every- 
thing seems to be trying to happen all at once. 
Events seem too big for the men who take part 
in them. You feel as if you are watching a crowd 
of boys taking a joy ride on an elephant. You 

38 


America AGAIN 39 


feel as if you are watching a crowd of precocious 
children let loose in a laboratory and playing with 
forces mighty enough to blow up a town. But 
there is a purpose in it all. And there is mind 
in it too. These children are wonderfully mature 
and able as organizers if they are innocent of 
many of the things which have given richness and 
ripeness to the world. They see clearly and they 
think directly and they have a sort of clean vigor 
in spite of their vices. They have the promise of 
youth and once and again you see a light in their 
eye which in its own tell-tale fashion reveals what 
a wealth of noble idealism they will produce when 
once they grow out of the day of irresponsible 
childhood into the day of maturity.” 

“Do you get all that from Haworth and Pax- 
son or do you plow it up out of your own mind?” 
I asked when the Lion paused for breath. 

“They give me the raw material,” he laughed 
back. “I will confess that I hand it on to you 
worked up a bit.” 

He waited a moment. Then he continued: 

“The amazing thing about all these wonderful 
and able Americans is their invincible habit of 
youth. They keep believing things about which 
most of the world has become cynical. They keep 
doing things most of the world has given up as im- 
possible. You feel as if you have been living in 


40 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 





the twilight in Europe and now for the first time 
you come out into clear and hopeful day with 
the sun shining and the most wonderful and in- 
spiring air blowing all about you. Of course the 
twilight has some*fine things in it we haven’t 
managed to get into our sunlit days. But at 
least we are witnessing the adolescence of a race 
that is coming and not the decadence mellow and 
autumnal of a race which is going.” 

“As a matter of fact, I have read both these 
books,” I said at length. “I lked them immensely. 
The fact that I read most of Professor Paxson’s 
book in a steamer coming home from Europe made 
it all the more interesting. But it did leave some 
long and serious thoughts as well as some proud 
and happy ones.” 

“You felt that the epitomizer of the ages hadn’t 
epitomized sufficiently?” asked the Lion. 

“Not quite that,” I replied. “But I was struck 
by the omissions in both books. I was immensely 
impressed by the fact that men could write a his- 
tory of the last fifty years and have so little to 
say about some things. ‘The study of the sub- 
jects not discussed in these volumes would be an 
interesting commentary on American life during 
the period.” 

“I am not sure that it would be just one,” re- 
plied the Lion. “You have to read a large num- 


AmeErica AGAIN AY 


ber of biographies of scholars and the men of 
letters and statesmen and preachers if you want 
to get a composite picture of the life of the 
mind in America during the last fifty years. And 
when you put it all together you will find that 
the period has been more rich and fruitful than 
you might suppose.” 

“There have been no end of rare flowers,” I 
argued back, “but I am talking of the flowers 
in all the gardens.” 

The Lion smiled one of his happy inscrutable 
smiles. 

“The rare flowers are getting in numberless 
gardens,” he said. “By and by they will be bloom- 
ing in all our hearts and then it will be possible 
to save America from the leaders without vision 
and the men without citizenship in the great 
human world.” 

“Precisely,” I flashed back. But just then I 
was called to the telephone and so did not have 
an opportunity to follow up my advantage. 


CHAPTER XI 
A ProPHer AND AN ARTIST 


HERE was a particularly easy chair 
beside the couch upon which the Lion lay. 
I dropped into it a little weary after a full 
day’s work. On the little table within easy reach 
of my friend lay the usual assortment of books. 
I picked up two of them. On each I read the name 
of Dr. J. H. Jowett. One was “The Eagle Life.” 
The other was “The Friend on the Road.” My 
friend watched me silently as I fingered the pages 
of the two books. I was picking out a phrase 
and a sentence and a paragraph here and there 
and so we sat until the quiet of the room and the 
gentle friendliness of the books and Dr. Jowett’s 
writing had wrought their own magic and the 
wheels of my mind began to move with easy 
energy. 
“Well?” I said at last looking up. 
“Well?” the Lion enquired with a quizzical 
smile. 
“No, I don’t intend to talk today,” I insisted. 


“Here you have been with these two books all 
42 


A PROPHET AND AN ARTIST 43 


day, and you are full of thoughts and feelings 
all ready to creep into words. Let me have some 
of them.” 

The Lion moved a little as he prepared to 
speak. 

“Dr. Jowett keeps growing for me as the years 
go by,” he began. “I heard him first years ago 
when he was at Carr’s Lane in Birmingham. One 
felt at once the delicacy and grace of his mind 
and the subtle spiritual charm of his preaching. 
Dale has always seemed to me like a great cathe- 
dral. Jowett seemed like the marvelously em- 
broidered communion cloth upon its altar. I was 
interested in the rare art which hid from sight 
the fact that it was art at all. I never forgot the 
sermon. But Dr. Jowett did not become one of 
my preachers. I was in all the hot enthusiasm of 
athletic activities. I had just been going back 
to Kingsley and my own mind responded to the 
yeast of a new restless social passion. I wanted 
a rugged voice all full of the sense of the thrust 
of verbal swords. Once in a while I would find 
a quiet mood when I would read a book by the 
minister of Carr’s Lane with the feeling that I 
was listening to the horns of some wonderful 
spiritual elfland. But it all seemed remote from 
the world where I was living.” 


AA Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


My friend lay very still for a moment. I was 
half afraid he would not go on. 

‘Then came the day when I was put out of the 
fight. And a good many other days followed 
after. Gradually I came to read many things 
and I found that I was asking new things of books 
and receiving new things from them. One day 
I picked up Dr. Jowett’s ‘Brooks by the Traveler’s 
Way.’ In a page or two I found its author all 
over again. Of course the change was not in him. 
It was in me. I knew now by a curious insight 
with what hard training in the gymnasium of the 
spirit it had become possible for this man to 
write with his gentle serene understanding of the 
evasive secrets of the soul which so easily elude the 
seeker that they can hardly be put into words. I 
found the virility back of all his gentleness and 
the strength back of all his fineness. It was as if 
a man who had only cared for a brass band had 
learned to love a violin. I had found a new instru- 
ment and I had found a master who knew deep 
and wonderful secrets of the music of the spirit.” 

The evening sun came through the western 
windows as the Lion spoke. Then when he was 
silent the colors out on the sky had their own 
words to speak and we sat there together in the 
companionship of the swan song of color as the 
day bade the world farewell. At last the greys 


A PropHET AND AN ARTIST 45 


began to take the place of the reds and the purples 
and in the growing shadows my friend spoke 
again: 

“These two books keep up the high tradition. 
‘The Eagle Life’ is a series of meditations, brood- 
ing, and understanding and rewarding upon many 
a seminal sentence—these sentences gathered like 
flowers from the Old Testament. ‘The Friend on | 
the Road?’ is a similar collection based upon lumi- 
nous words which glow in the heart of the New 
Testament. ‘The marks of the passing years are 
upon these volumes. ‘There is many a line now 
upon the face of Dr. Jowett’s art, worn there by 
the cruel anxieties of the years of the war. There 
is many a phrase the cut of whose insight comes 
from the searching experiences of the difficult 
days through which we are passing. There is a 
new sweep of the mind. There is a deep response 
to the perplexities of this bewildered age. But 
under all and through all there is the same sure 
music of the eternal verities. The tone of the 
music has deepened. Its minor is more poignant. 
The hand which holds the bow can draw more 
mellow meaning from the strings. But rising from 
the human sympathy, high above the voices of 
this troubled age as they speak in this understand- 
ing interpretation, is the authentic voice of per- 


AG Tue Lion 1x His Den 


fect peace and everlasting serenity which is the 
voice of God. So Dr. Jowett has become one of 
my preachers. And now I go back to him day 
after day.” 


CHAPTER XII 
A True Porrrarr 


HE Lion was holding in his hand the new 
life of Dr. Jowett by that keen and under- 
standing journalist Mr. Arthur Porritt. 


“John Henry Jowett, 
C.H., M.A., D.D. 
by 
Arthur Porritt 
with a foreword by 
The Archbishop of Canterbury.” 


I read as my friend held the book open at the 
title page before my eye. 

“You have read it?” I asked. 

“Every word of it,” replied the Lion. 

“And what is your verdict?” I enquired, in 
eager pursuit of my friend’s mind. 

He waited a little turning the leaves with a deli- 
cate and affectionate touch. Then he spoke. 

“Do you know I was almost afraid to read it?” 
he began. “Of course I knew from Mr. Porritt’s 
bright and clever book, ‘The Best I Remember,’ 


how wide ranging a mind and what a wealth of 
47 


48 Tue Lion 1x His DEN 





human sympathy he would bring to any task. 
But after all that was not enough. For Jowett 
was not as other men. ‘There was an extreme 
delicacy of texture about him which reminds one 
of the loveliest lace. ‘There was something like an 
evanescent moment as the sunset reveals itself in 
one flame of softened and yet glowing radiance 
just before the coming of the darkness. ‘To pic- 
ture Jowett all this must be brought to light. If 
the colors are too strong it is not Jowett at all. 
If they fade away and lack firmness it is no more 
a picture of the great preacher than if the pig- 
ments are too heavily laid upon the canvas. I 
am afraid I opened the book expecting to find a 
great wealth of material about Jowett, all set 
forth with a certain bright skill, but after all not 
a full-length portrait of the elusive, mysterious 
personality which captured and yet in a sense 
baffied the English-speaking world.” 

Once more my friend was quite silent turning 
the pages slowly. Then he went on: 

“The facts are here. It does not seem that 
anything that really matters is omitted. With a 
patient industry Mr. Porritt has gathered from 
varied sources just those things which we want 
to know. He lets Jowett speak for himself. Mul- 
tiplied letters are quoted each just at the right 
moment and each with its new revelation of the 


A True Porrrair 49 


mind and the heart of the author. You know the 
history of his ministry. You know his public 
work. You know his methods of study and of 
sermon preparation. You have just the right 
background for all this in the life of the time. 
All Mr. Porritt’s years in Fleet Street have given 
him the seeing eye. And the tale he tells unfolds 
a panorama which in its general features he has 
watched for many years. You are led to know 
something of Jowett’s habits of devotion, and 
you get hints of his wonderful home life, though 
here, as is fitting, Mr. Porritt speaks with a re- 
serve which Jowett himself would have approved. 
But it is really of none of these details that I am 
thinking. The real achievement comes to this. 
Out of all the facts and interpretations the figure 
of Jowett himself arises, with that impalpable 
charm that gracious fragrance of the spirit, that 
combination of a shy and a sensitive nature with 
the firmness of tempered steel, that living in 
the light of the eternal, and that perpetual mas- 
tery of all the artistry of subtly woven words to 
tell the experience, which first captured the ima- 
gination and then won the heart of those who care 
for the things of the spirit in Birmingham, and 
New York, and London. There are a great many 
other things one wants to say, but first of all I 
should like to break into Mr. Porritt’s office in 


50 Tue Lion 1x His Den 


Fleet Street and thank him for capturing and 
giving permanent expression to the quality of so 
elusive a personality. ‘The reader of Jowett’s 
sermons will come to them with a new understand- 
ing after he has closed this book. And he will 
understand what exquisite and delicate flowers 
of the spirit can bloom amidst the smoke and the 
buzzing wheels of this age of whirring machines.” 


CHAPTER XIII 
Ont American Minp 


HE Lion was not reading. He was think- 

ing. But it was not hard to see where he 

found inspiration for his thought. Beside 
him lay four books by that minister of subtly dis- 
tinguished style, Dr. Gaius Glen Atkins. The 
books were these: “‘Pilgrims of the Lonely Road,” 
“The Undiscovered Country,” “Jerusalem Past 
and Present,” and ‘‘Modern Religious Cults and 
Movements.” I stood looking at the books for a 
moment or two and waiting for the Lion to speak. 
After a little he looked up. 

**As you see, I’ve been spending the afternoon 
with your friend Dr. Gaius Glenn Atkins. And 
a tremendously good afternoon it has been.” 

He moved a little on the bed to find a more 
comfortable position. ‘Then he went on: “About 
three years ago I first discovered Dr. Atkins. By 
the merest chance I saw a reference to “The Pil- 
grims of the Lonely Road.’ I had known the name 
of its author before, but he had been just a name 
and nothing more. But this title held my atten- 

51 


52 Tue Lion 1n His Den 


tion. I thought I knew something about the 
lonely road, and I felt a sudden curiosity to see 
if the man who had constructed this title also 
knew. Well, I hadn’t gotten far into it until my 
questions were all answered, but better than that 
I had found a new friend. It didn’t in the slight- 
est matter whether I should ever see Dr. Atkins 
in the flesh. The important thing was that I 
had made friends with his mind.” 

The Lion held the “Pilgrims of the Lonely 
Road” in his hand, touching the volume with a 
kind of quiet affection. 

“Tt isn’t simply that this book tells about peo- 
ple who have walked in the solitary way. You 
very soon know that he too has been a pilgrim or 
he would never know in such a fashion the secrets 
of the Road. And what a style he has! It re- 
quired years to achieve that vehicle of expres- 
sion. The gentleness, the grace, the steady 
strength, the penetrating phrase, and the slow 
and patient distillation of the music of the mind— 
all this I welcomed with a sort of rapture. It 
seemed almost too good to be true—perhaps it 
was too good to be false—that in the midst of 
America’s most characteristically vigorous ex- 
pression of the new industry, this mind pursued 
its ripe and gracious way. It requires some 
mental effort to think of the automatic machine 


OnE American Minp ) 53 


and of Gaius Glenn Atkins at the same moment. 
But of course he is much more than a man who 
has opened mystic portals and after walking 
within has come back with a strange and haunting 
grace hanging about his words. He is a man 
of his own time who loves a farm and _ possesses 
a truly scientific knowledge of nature and de- 
lights in a rugged word and an incisive and honest 
phrase. It is this combination of the scientific 
mind and the mystical insight which perhaps ap- 
peals most to one. You feel that in ‘The Undis- 
covered Country,’ and it gives its own definition 
to that very notable book ‘Modern Religious 
Cults and Movements.’ Whatever a man has read 
about Christian Science and other such move- 
ments he has left a great empty place in his under- 
standing until he reads Dr. Atkins’s book. It is 
far and away the most significant of recent studies 
of religious phenomena written—well, I should be 
inclined to go so far as to say—of those written in 
the English-speaking world. Sympathy and criti- 
cism, appraisal and understanding, are all here. 
There is an adequate historical perspective, and 
so you have more than a study. You have a mag- 
num opus.” 

We were silent a little while. 

“You find the historical perspective in ‘Jerusa- 
lem Past and Present.’ ” I ventured. 


54 Tue Lion in His DEn 


‘“Yes, you see the city of the Ages come right 
into this age,” said the Lion. 

But it was of “Modern Religious Cults and 
Movements” that I was thinking as I walked away. 


CHAPTER XIV 
CoMPLACENT CYNICISM 


HE two of us had been quite silent for a 

half hour. The twilight had deepened into 

darkness and the moon was peering with a 
sort of insistent questioning through the window. 
And in the stillness there was a sense of compan- 
ionship to which neither of us was insensible. 

“The best thing about life is that the stars 
may keep their brightness,” said my friend at last. 

“Your stars keep learning new secrets of radi- 
ance,” I replied quietly. 

There was no direct reply from the man lying 
on the bed, but after a little he spoke again. 

“Joe Newton was here, today,” he said, and 
there was a certain suggestion of significance in 
his tone. 

“TI haven’t seen Joe for a good many years,” I 
replied, “but I hear he is the pastor of a great 
church in the West.” 

“Yes, he is still preaching,” said the Lion. 
Then with a touch of very unusual bitterness he 


added, ‘“‘I wonder what he preaches about?” 
55 


56 Tue Lion in His Den 


His tone arrested me. ‘‘What’s got the matter 
with Joe?” I asked. 

“T don’t know at all,” said the Lion, “except 
that for shrewd and cynical disillusionment I 
haven’t met his equal in many a day. He thinks 
of people as pawns in a game. And he knows 
how to handle them right well. That is evident. 
He has a rather ugly complacency. You can see 
him moving about with adroit flatteries and subtle 
ministries to human vanity as he talks. He knows 
the right people, he says. He knows what buttons 
to press. He admits that he doesn’t need a pub- 
licity expert. He knows the game better than 
any of them. It’s all a matter of passwords, he 
says, and he doesn’t need a notebook for the pass- 
words, though there are a good many of them. 
He is full of health and energy and exuberant 
bodily life. He has a flashing eye, with a keen- 
edged mirth touched by something a bit sardonic. 
He is like a price list not very closely connected 
with actual values. And he is a preacher!’ The 
emphasis on the words of the last sentence I can- 
not reproduce and I scarcely know how to sug- 
gest it. 

We were still in the darkness and once more fell 
into silence. After a while I emerged. 

“Is it as bad as that with Joe,” I asked. 

“It’s fairly bad,” replied the Lion. “I tried 


CoMPLACENT CYNICISM 5Y 


a good many approaches. You can’t always judge 
a man by his surfaces. And perhaps I failed to 
touch the right spring. At all events I could 
find nothing but hard glitter, and there was a 
strange depression in the atmosphere when the 
chap we knew so many years ago had gone. It 
was as if one had been looking for sunlight and a 
glare of electricity had been turned on instead.” 

“And you have come to the conclusion that 
if the church is to be saved from futility the 
preachers must be saved from contentment with 
superficial success,” I said, a bit too sententiously 
I fear. 

“Oh, I’m not attacking preachers as a class, 
though I admit the principle ‘like people, like 
priest,’ ’ said the Lion. “And since there is no 
sun at the moment turn on the electric light, and 
read ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology.’ ” 


CHAPTER XV 
SpEakinc oF Mirrors 


HE Lion was holding a book in his hand. 

He was making little inarticulate sounds 

of mirth as he read. I stood beside him 
waiting. He turned the book toward me and I 
caught its title, “The Mirrors of Washington.” 
‘““Have you read it?” he asked. 

“T finished it last night,” was my reply. 

“And what do you think of it?” 

“A clever bit of cynicism now and then is 
relished by the best of men,” I paraphrased. 

“Tt is all that,”? admitted the Lion, “‘and more, 
the way in which the author uses that sharp, thin 
blade of his. Listen to this: ‘After his election he 
(President Harding) took Senators Freylinghuy- 
sen, Hale, and Elkins with him on his trip to 
Texas. Senator Knox, observing his choice, is 
reported to have said, ‘I think he is taking those 
three along because he wanted complete mental 
relaxation.’ ” Or take this: ‘It is characteristic of 
certain temperaments that when they first face 
life they should run away from it, as Mr. Wilson 


did, when, having studied law and having been 
58 


SPEAKING oF Mrrrors 59 


admitted to the bar, he abandoned practice and 
went to teach in a girls’ school.’? And here are two 
other morsels: ‘Washington gossip credits him 
(Woodrow Wilson) with inventing the phrase, 
“the bungalow mind,” to describe the present oc- 
cupant of the White House.’ Another remark of 
his anent the new President is said to have been, ‘I 
look forward to the new administration with no 
unpleasant anticipations except those caused by 
Mr. Harding’s literary style.’ There is a good 
deal of wicked malice in this sort of thing. But 
it is done with a flash and energy and often with 
a penetration which makes you see to the heart 
of a man’s inadequacy even while you laugh.” 
My friend kept turning over the pages of the 
book. He came to the discussion of Senator 
Lodge: “This is a work of art,” he declared, 
“black art perhaps, but wonderfully effective. It 
is as if some mischievous demon had told all of 
Senator Lodge’s dark secrets before the day of 
judgment. Some times you feel that the worst 
you can say of a certain type of man is that he 
has to live with himself.” The Lion mused for a 
moment. ‘Then he went on: ‘This book is a gal- 
lery of petty men seen against the background of 
great issues. He makes you see Lansing as a 
study m timorous futility. Colonel House is a 
pleased spectator, quite out of place when he finds 


60 Tue Lion in His Den 


that by some queer magic his box at the opera 
has been flung into the centre of the stage. Hoover 
is a man who knows how to deal with facts and 
forces but is curiously ill at ease with people. 
Hughes is a man-whose gift of lucid exposition 
makes things seem simpler than they really are. 
Hiram Johnson is a phonograph with the Ameri- 
can people themselves as a record. ‘The Mirrors 
of Washington’ is the work of a diagnostician. 
And like that sort of work it is much keener in 
the presence of disease than in the presence of 
health.” 

‘You pay rather a large price for such a book,” 
I ventured. “TI finished it feeling that I had been 
in a hospital. I wanted to get out of doors. After 
all there are things besides germs. I wanted to 
give the work a subtitle. I wanted to call it, 
‘Pathological Studies of American Public Men?’ ” 

The Lion smiled a little soberly. ‘To be sure, 
you never go to such a book for information. The 
author has the easy objectivity of a man without 
conviction. He has the easy merciless gaiety of 
a man without ideals. He has the bright and cut- 
ting urbanity of a man who does not care deeply 
about anything. For all that, it’s an extremely 
stimulating book he has written. Many a man 
of greater depth and seriousness could learn much 
from the author of these stinging sketches.” 


SPEAKING oF Mrrrors 61 


The Lion was fingering the book as he spoke. 
Then there was a quiet fire in his eyes as he ut- 
tered the last word of all conversation that day: 
‘The man who wrote “The Mirrors of Washing- 
ton’ has missed one thing for all his cleverness. 
He has not discovered that America has a soul!” 


CHAPTER XVI 
Tur Great Irattan 


DS PEAKING of Dante—” began the Lion. 
I leaned back in my chair and waited in 
quiet expectancy. My friend was very 

much at home in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries. And I knew that the six-hundredth an- 
niversary of the death of the great Florentine poet 
had found him renewing many an intimate con- 
tact with the period and writing of Dante. 

‘A man of our time ought really to begin with 
‘De Monarchia,’ ” said the Lion. 

“What about all the curious top-heavy argu- 
ments and all the involved unrealities of dialectic?” 
I asked. 

“I’m not thinking of them,” replied the Lion, “I 
am thinkmg of the commanding ideas of this 
Latin work of Dante’s. I am thinking of his pas- 
sionate conviction that the world must be one 
world. I am thinking of his clear vision of the 
ugly futility of endless wars fought about mean- 
ingless issues. I am thinking of his hope for a 
world held in stable peace, by a unity which em- 


braces all mankind.’’ 
62 


Tue Great [Taian 63 


“But was not his unified world an autocracy?” 
I asked. 

“Ym not claiming that he had a formula for 
the bringing in of the new day,” retorted my 
friend. “It was the Holy Roman Empire first 
and last with Dante. But I am claiming that in 
the terms of the political world-view possible to 
a man of his time he saw and expressed things of 
permanent significance and value. We will not 
use his methods. But we do need his passionate 
insight into the meaning of a stable peace. And 
we do need his unhesitating devotion to the strug- 
gle for the unity of the world.” 

‘You prize him more as a political philosopher 
than as a poet,” I remarked, making my sentence 
half a statement, half a question. 

“You can’t make that sharp contrast,” replied 
the Lion. ‘The man who wrote ‘De Monarchia’ 
also wrote the ‘Divina Commedia.’ One had to do 
with a unified world. The other had to do with 
a unified universe. One saw peace triumphant 
on this planet. The other saw peace triumphant 
among all the stars. There is exhaustless music 
in Dante. But it is the keenest of thought turned 
into asong. The thinker and the singer are joined 
in holy wedlock in the writings of the great 
Florentine.” 

“Do you think it is possible to get a sharp 


64 Tue Lion in His DEN 


sense of reality from writing which is so completely 
saturated with the superstition of the Middle 
Ages as the ‘Divine Comedy?’ ” I asked. 

My friend mused a moment. 

“After all,” he said, “the things of which you 
are thinking only belong to the wrappings of the 
poem. ‘The essential matters are eternal in their 
significance and in their appeal. Perhaps I can 
put it in this way. A modern man will under- 
stand Dante’s poem best if he forgets about the 
literal hell and purgatory and paradise and thinks 
of three characteristics of the life of the soul as 
it is found in this world. For that is the endless 
appeal of the poem. Everything Dante found in 
hell you can find in London and New York. The 
same inevitable punishments are working them- 
selves out in human lives in all our towns. And 
everything which Dante found in purgatory you 
can find in your own city. Whenever a man takes 
pain as discipline he enters into that realm of. 
creative suffering which is the real meaning of 
purgatory. For be sure of it, my friend, purga- 
tory is all about you. It is the secret of those 
who take every terrible experience as a method 
by which they are being prepared for some great 
and noble thing which is to follow. There was 
awful suffering in Dante’s Purgatory. But there 


THe Great ITALIAN 65 


was no unhappiness. You cannot be unhappy 
when your heart is alive with hope.” 

I looked at the bed upon which my friend was 
lying and thought of all his helpless years. I 
knew that he was talking of the Italian poet. I 
knew also that his own experience and his own vic- 
tory were unconsciously becoming articulate in 
his speech. But he was going on. 

**And, strange as it seems to say it, what Dante 
found in heaven may be found right in this life. 
Gleams of it come to all of us in our best moments. 
And it is the light which shines from the rarest 
and brightest spirits in the world. For even here 
the rose of love and fire has bloomed.” 

As I walked away I was repeating the last 
words my friend spoke that day: “As long as men 
have hell in their hearts, as long as they wrest 
character from bitter pain, and as long as a 
deathless ideal haunts their noblest hours, they 
will go back to Dante. It was after all his chief 
glory that he saw eternity in the human spirit.” 


CHAPTER XVII 
Tur CorRELATION OF THE ARTS 


NE of the Lion’s musical friends was 
() staying in the house at the time. From 
the music-room down stairs came the 
sound of the piano. First there was the exquisite, 
dreamlike beauty of the Moonlight Sonata. Then 
came all the vigor and climbing energy of the 
Pilgrims Chorus. After that there was silence 
and we knew that the man of music having tuned 
his mind was applying himself to some work of 
his own. 
“Tt comes to about the same thing whether it’s 
music or poetry, doesn’t it?” inquired the Lion. 
“Probably it does,” I replied, “but I wont en- 
tirely commit myself until I have a suspicion of 
what you are talking about.” 
My friend lay musing for a little while. Then 
he said: 
“Put Tennyson in the place of Beethoven, and 
put Browning in the place of Wagner and you 
have it.” 


“You mean that just as Wagner used disson- 
66 


Tue CorRELATION OF THE ARTS 67 


ance skilfully in musical composition, so Brown- 
ing used dissonance skilfully in poetry?” I ven- 
tured. 

“IT mean that every movement in one art can 
be paralleled in the other,” replied the Lion. 
“You can carry it as far as you like. Whitman 
has his musical kin. And syncopated composi- 
tions are of a close kin to some very characteristic 
aspects of the most emancipated writing which is 
willing to call itself poetry.” 

There was a little wrinkle on the Lion’s brow. 
He leaned toward me as he continued: 

“There is a wonderful correlation between all 
the arts and all the movements of the mind. Take 
a great springtime of the human spirit like the 
Renaissance. There is the brilliancy and beauty 
of new life everywhere. ‘There is motion and 
energy and adventure in the very air you breathe. 
Then all this uprush of new vitality subsides and 
you have the creaking of the hard bones of a new 
scholasticism. You can find just that thing once 
and again in the history of music. There are the 
times when the very secrets of the soul seem whis- 
pered in haunting and glorious sound. Then 
there are the periods of correct and unilluminated 
dullness, the periods of barren scholasticism in 
the musical world.” 

“How do you account for it? Why do all the 


68 Tuer Lion 1n His Den 


arts tell the same story in their own individual 
way?” 

“That is just because they are all the expres- 
sion of the same struggling, aspiring human spirit. 
The one vital energy moves through them all.” 

Now the musician below began to play one of 
Chopin’s Nocturnes. And we sat quite silent let- 
ting it speak to us. Then the Lion went on and 
it seemed as if his speaking was actual thinking 
aloud. 

“There really isn’t much place for scorn,” he 
said. “Even the movements which seem most 
bizarre and barbaric come from some actual thing 
in human nature. They need to be understood 
and disciplined and then bent to some fine artistic 
and human purpose. The great builders of the 
early thirteenth century understood it. Think 
of how they used gargoyles. There does not seem 
to be anything very prepossessing about these 
grinning, leering devils. But the architects of 
the middle ages understood them and used them. 
They put them into the beauty and serene joyful- 
ness of their great cathedrals in such a fashion 
that the total effect of perfect and aspiring beauty 
was enhanced by their presence. The petty mind 
despises the new and raw and crude thing. The 
wise and understanding mind takes it up with a 
certain masterful sympathy and includes it in a 


Tre CorRRELATION OF THE ARTS 69 


total work in which all the raw crudity is lost in 
the ample fullness and maturity of the completed 
work.” 

‘“There’s something like a philosophy of art 
in that attitude,” I remarked while the Lion puck- 
ered his brow in further thought. He went on 
quite as if I had not spoken: “You cannot go 
back to Athens. You cannot go back to Florence. 
You cannot go back to anything. You must al- 
ways go on. But you can carry. on the rarest 
beauty of Greece and the ripest charm of [taly. 
Only to keep it all alive you must be uniting it 
with something deep and characteristic and vital 
which comes out of your own age and your own 
land.” 

“Then you see more hope for the future in 
Vachel Lindsay than in Alfred Noyes?” I en- 
quired as I rose to go. 

“T know what you mean. But you must not 
forget that Noyes wrote “The Flower of Old 
Japan,” the Lion threw after me as I passed 
out of the door. ' 


CHAPTER XVIII 
CHRISTIANITY AND THE ARISTOCRACY OF LETTERS 


HE Lion had just come out of a bad night. 
The traces of pain were still upon his face. 
After a word of greeting I was about to 
leave him. But the decisive pressure of his hand 
upon my arm detained me. I stood looking down 
into his face with its fine lines and all the delicate 
tracery of brooding thought and all the subtle 
marks of spiritual victory upon it. Just then it 
seemed a long distance to the day when I had 
watched his greatest achievement in football. And 
yet the tragic experience which had cut his life 
in two had made him a greater man. I was begin- 
ning to realize that it had also made his life a 
more productive force in the world. <A touch of 
something whimsical came into his eyes as he looked 
up at me. 
“You are afraid I am not fit to live with this 
morning?” he queried. 
“T know that you exercise shameful and com- 
pletely tyrannical control over your nerves,” I 
replied. “It is only that I am not sure you want 


to talk.” 
70 


CHRISTIANITY AND ARISTOCRACY OF LEtTTERS ‘1 


“Well, I do,” said the Lion tersely, and I 
dropped into a chair. 

“Have you ever thought in how many centuries 
Christianity produced the best writing which 
dropped from the pens of men?” he asked. And 
then without waiting for a reply he went on: 

“Dante did the most luminous work of the 
fourteenth century. Nothing else equalled the 
Summa of Saint Thomas in the thirteenth. Abe- 
lard’s writing is the expression of the most bril- 
liant and understanding mind of the twelfth. 
Nothing else written in the period has the passion 
and the power of the Confessions of Augustine. 
There is a pungent vitality about the writing of 
Tertullian which is unmatched by any other writ- 
ings of his age. If you drop down to the seven- 
teenth century Bunyan’s masterpiece holds its 
own even among the brilliant books which were 
appearing in his day. Take it by and large the 
Christian writers have more than held their own.” 

He paused, and it was evident that he was lead- 
ing up to something which was weighing upon his 
mind. 

“But ever since the Renaissance,” he said, 
“Christian men of the pen have had a harder fight 
for their place in the world. The brilliant secular 
mind has more and more asserted itself. Shakes- 
peare writes with respectful politeness from with- 


yee Tuer Lion In His Den 


out the secret places of the Christian life. Vol- 
taire has pretty much everything else except the 
capacity to understand historic Christianity. To 
be sure the great nineteenth century men were 
only possible with Christianity in the background. 
It gave them sou. It gave them seeds. And it 
matured their harvests. Carlyle, Ruskin, and 
Matthew Arnold were a product of Christianity, 
though each had his mdependent position and 
view. 'Tolstoi was a product of a noble fragment 
of Christianity. But the twentieth century is cu- 
riously lacking in Christian voices which bring the 
capacity for penetrating criticism and the power 
of creative inspiration. With the greatest oppor- 
tunity for analysis and synthesis which the ages 
have offered Christianity is curiously silent.” 

“There are a good many able men who are writ- 
ing from the Christian point of view,” I ventured. 

“Oh, there 1s no end of useful men. But I’m 
not seeing any really great men. The utterly 
fearless eye. The entirely candid mind. The 
deep and healing heart of world-wide sympathy. 
The power of creative thought. The capacity for 
expression gleaming with all the light which shines 
perpetually upon living words. I do not know 
where you will find all these combined in one 
man.” 

“Are you not asking a good deal?” I put in. 


CHRISTIANITY AND ARISTOCRACY OF LETTERS 73 


“Y am asking no more than Christianity has 
done in many another century,” flashed back the 
Lion. “It was tugging away at my mind when 
I could not sleep last night. The swords were 
going in my body and this sword was going in my 
mind. I thought of people as brilliantly sar- 
donic as Dean Inge, of people as keen and 
scholarly as Dr. Selbie. And I thought of Ameri- 
cans dripping with social passion and bright with 
delightful popular gifts. But I could not find 
my great man who is able to pass the white light 
of the eternal gospel through his mind and send 
it forth glowing with all the colors of the life of 
our own age. Will you find him for me?” 

And with these words the Lion let me go for 
the day. 


CHAPTER XIX 
Reapinc PuHimosorpHy 


HE Lion was holding in his hand a little 
brochure. Leaning toward him I read its 
title, “ ‘Philosophy and the Christian Re- 

ligion.? An Inaugural Lecture delivered before 
~ the University of Oxford on May 4, 1920, by 
Clement C. J. Webb, M.A., Fellow of Magdalen 
College and Oriel Professor of the Philosophy of 
the Christian Religion.” On the table beside the 
bed were the two volumes of the Lord Gifford lec- 
tures by Professor Webb: “God and Person- 
ality,’’ and “Divine Personality and Human Life.” 
Beside them lay his little volume, “A History of 
Philosophy,” published in the Home University 
Library. 

“It looks as if you have found a new hero,” I 
began with a good deal of banter in my tone. 

“Not at all a new one,” replied the Lion. “I 
began with Webb a good while ago. But only 
lately did I get into the Gifford lectures and now 
I have been going over the effective little history 
of philosophy again.” 

74 


READING PHILOSOPHY 15 


“You don’t think that philosophy has rather 
worn thin then?” I enquired. 

“Not when I have been reading Clement C. J. 
Webb,” declared my friend. ‘In fact I feel that 
it’s at the very beginning of some extremely prom- 
ising service.” ‘The Lion waited a moment. ‘Then 
he went on: 

‘“You see Webb is an unusual sort of person. 
To begin with he is a man of letters to the finger 
tips. He has read widely and deeply and he has 
a wonderful feeling for a live and telling phrase. 
He knows how to command his reading for the 
purposes of illustration in the most natural and 
human way. You have the grace and the facile 
movement and the skill of a man to whom phrases 
are bits of marble to be carved into fine and fin- 
ished form and all the while you have the close and 
masterful thinking of a highly disciplined mind 
trained for the tasks of philosophic speculation. 
It’s a wonderful combination. And that isn’t all. 
Webb is all the while watching the moving pic- 
ture of life. He hears what people say. He sees 
what they do. And all this everyday experience 
of observation is bent to the purposes of his ex- 
position. It makes philosophy seem wonderfully 
near to life. Then Webb is always working on 
the assumption, implicit and perhaps unconscious 
but none the less real and definite, that every ac- 





16 Tue Lion in His Den 


tual thing in human experience has rights which 
must be respected. He is all the while trying to 
be loyal to the physical facts. He is all the while 
trying to be loyal to the mental facts. He is all 
the while trying to treat faithfully the moral facts. 
He is held by a scientific conscience to a candid 
and fair treatment of the religious facts. So you 
come to feel at last that you are following a singu- 
larly honest and trustworthy mind.” | 

“Tsn’t an Oxford thinker likely to be nearer to 
fifth and fourth century Athens than to twentieth 
century London?” 

The Lion smiled. 

““Oh, he does appreciate Plato and Aristotle and 
he has not failed to understand a few other Greeks. 
And perhaps he understands the twentieth century 
all the better for that. In fact there may be such 
a thing as understanding the twentieth century 
better than it understands itself. You see some 
of our bright young fellows are so busy interpret- 
ing our own time in the terms of itself that they 
have no standards and no basis of comparison. 
Sometimes they mistake movement for progress 
and conflagration for illumination. I do not fancy 
Webb is likely to make these mistakes.” 

“You incorrigible Victorian. How you scorn 
the world in which you live.” I laughed back. 

“YT won’t have it,” frowned the Lion. “Stop 


Reapinc Pumosopuy fg 
calling me names. You think that when you have 
given a thing a name you have explained it. Some- 
times you only show that you do not understand 
it. Besides I do not despise the time in which I 
live. But on the other hand I do not worship it. 
I pay it the high tribute of honest and earnest 
criticism.” 

“But about Webb ” T interrupted. 

“Webb is a man of actual! erudition,” replied 
my friend. ‘He is a man of definite scholarship 
as well. And he can think with a clearness and a 
straight pursuit of his theme which delight the 
mind. He is as careful with his opponents as with 
the men whose positions he accepts. And step by 
step in the high argument he conducts the reader 
is led forward until at last the meaning of person- 
ality stands out in clear and sure perspective. 
Many a cobweb is disposed of and at the end you 
feel in definite possession of some structural cer- 
tainties regarding life and religion.” 

“Does he do everything for you? Or does he 
leave anything for the mind of the reader?” I 
asked. 

“When you read his treatment of the economic 
life, the scientific life, the «esthetic life, the moral 
life and the religious life, you have an ample reply 
to that query,” said the Lion. “The fact is he 
sets you going all the while. He gives you a little 








48 Tuer Lion 1x His Den 


glimpse of no end of vistas. But he leaves you 
to become their explorer.” 

“Tf all that is true I have an engagement with 
Webb,” I ag “Who did you say publishes 
his books?” 


CHAPTER XX 
An AMERICAN IN LONDON 


WALKED quietly into the room where the 
Lion lay, thinking that if he was asleep I . 
would not disturb him. His eyes were open 

and they were full of a deep, mellow light. And 
on his face there was a quiet wistfulness which I 
had not often seen there. His countenance 
brightened as he saw me and he pointed to a book 
which lay on the table beside him. It was Joseph 
Fort Newton’s ‘Preaching in London.” 

“How much of England he took to England on 
his very first journey,” began my friend. ‘How 
many brooding hours he had spent in imagination 
in quiet English lanes before he ever saw one of 
them. How he had lingered beside every great 
English shrine before he ever crossed the sea. 
And when he did go, what words of gentle and 
loving understanding he knew to tell about it all. 
I was just thinking as you came in that I shall 
never see it all again. And I was saying to my- 
self, ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s 


here.” Newton brought it all back so vividly. 
if 





80 Tue Lion in His DEn 


And of course I am really very glad when I think 
about it all, for I’ve spent many months in the 
lovely English country and the wonderful Eng- 
lish towns, and nobody can rob me of that.” 

It was clear that the book had indeed moved 
my friend and had made him willing to talk in 
a fashion which was far from his wont. He saw 
something of this in my eyes for he said at once: 

“Tt’s the witchery of that man’s writing which 
did it. He has broken down all my reserves by 
the sheer loveliness of his style. And you come 
in before I have time to wear the face which 
belongs to the world and even to my friends.” 

He put his hand on my arm with a little touch 
of friendliness which meant that he was glad I 
had come and also that there was to be no more 
talk about the inhibitions his illness had brought 
to him. He held the book in his hand a moment 
as he said: | 

‘You know it’s rather wonderful to have Fort 
Newton come out of America? It’s more than 
his innate sympathy for much that is most 
characteristic of England. There is something 
continental about him. And a very delicate and 
exotic thing it is. Imagine Amiel coming to life 
in Iowa and writing the Journal Intime there! 
I’m glad that anything so delicate and so full 
of gracious charm has come out of our contem- 


An AMERICAN IN LONDON 81 


porary life. There is no end of virility too. He 
is a sturdy man with the mind of a meditative 
essayist and the heart of a mystic. The ripeness 
of it all astonishes me. You feel as if all his 
words have been pressed between the leaves of a 
fragrant mind for many a year. And they come 
forth odorous with the subtile richness of a 
tempered and gracious culture.” 

I was waiting while my friend was finding 
words to pay his tribute of appreciation. When 
he had finished I remarked: 

“Fort Newton’ can say some things with a 
terribly cutting edge, don’t you think?” 

The Lion moved a little impatiently. 

‘“Any supremely sensitive mind is like that. 
You have to have nerves in order to have such 
delicate instruments of insight. I wouldn’t deny 
that sometimes in the heat of sternly difficult days 
Fort Newton wrote with his nerves. It’s part of 
the revelation of a rare and sensitive personality.” 

The Lion lay quite still for a little while. Then 
he went on: | 

“This little book will be read for a very long 
time. The surface of such a mind is not often 
exposed to mighty events. London and the war 
and the mind and the spirit of man are held in 
a medium of crystal clearness and best of all in 
a mind which calls the photographic word and the 


82 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 





revealing and shining phrase and even as they are 
called so they come.” 

The characteristic wrinkle was on the Lion’s 
brow for a moment. Then he continued: 

“‘A fine piece of work Fort Newton did in 
England. I had many letters from friends about 
it. His hold was becoming stronger up to the 
very moment of his leaving. But I wonder just 
a little if it is not another type of American who 
will come to stay in England as he makes his 
contribution to the uniting of the two countries. 
I fancy there is a sense in which a man who under- 
stands England less might end by understanding 
it better. Sometimes a clairvoyant mind is un- 
canny in respect of faults as well as in respect of 
virtues. In any event we need the man who 
preached in the City Temple during the war as 
a prophet of the things he sees so clearly in Amer- 
ica. We need him more than he is needed in the 
lovely, tight little island across the sea.” 


CHAPTER XXI 
A Great Scorrish PREacHER 


HE Lion had been having a period when 
there was an uprush of unusual vitality 
from some hidden reservoir of his organ- 

ism. Even his physician had been surprised at — 
the hours which he had been able to spend in con- 
secutive reading, and his pencil had moved with 
something like the old-time industry over the 
page. The next month one of his trenchant 
individual articles delighted the readers of a cer- 
tain contemporary Review. Just as this period 
of energy began to wane he got into two books 
by that preacher of passionate insight, Dr. John 
A. Hutton. First he read the lectures on preach- 
ing: “That The Ministry Be Not Blamed.” 
Then he read those throbbing and penetrating 
essays: “Discerning the Times.” I was walking 
about in his capacious den picking a book from 
a shelf here and there and amusing myself half 
indolently when the voice of my friend called me: 

“Come and talk to me about Scottish 
preachers.” 

“Which shall it be?” I called merrily as I 


turned toward him. “Shall it be Whyte who stood 
83 


84 Tuer Lion 1n His Den 


shuddering on the very abyss of the darkness 
and made things authentic in which the modern 
world thought it had ceased to believe? Shall 
it be Matheson whose secrets of beautiful and 
musical English fairly make you shed tears until 
you forget his English in the spiritual beauty of 
his message? Shall it be——?” 

“Let it be John A. Hutton,” interrupted the 
Lion. 

“The Scottish minister who went to Russia to 
find his conscience,” I threw in. 

The Lion smiled at that. 

“He does know rather more about Russian 
literature than most people,” he admitted. “And 
no doubt that has very much deepened his 
message. Why is it that those Russians can so 
amazingly pierce your soul? Any way he is a 
real preacher. He restores my faith in the 
ministry. And when he talks to young men he 
has a skill and an insight beyond praise. I hope 
you will recommend ‘That the Ministry Be Not 
Blamed’ to no end of your ministerial friends. 
. . . T was most interested in ‘Discerning the 
Times.’ There are plenty of people who are 
optimists because they have refused to look 
squarely at what is happening in the world. 
There are plenty of people who are pessimists 
because they have looked right into the face of 


A Great ScortTisH PREACHER 85 


life and have been frightened out of their wits. 
Hutton has looked. He has seen all that there is 
to see. But he has not gotten into a panic. He 
has not lost hope. He still believes. And he 
still has a song on his lips. He has wedded 
honesty and faith. And believe me that is a rare 
wedlock.” 

The Lion had spoken so rapidly that there had 
been no place for a word from me. Now he 
paused and I worked my way into the little 
crevice of silence. 

“There is an extraordinary ripeness about 
many of these English and Scottish preachers,” 
I ventured. 

“They read and think and brood while we buy 
ice-cream freezers,” threw out the Lion. 

“Oh come now,” I replied, “you don’t mean to 
say that you think all the varied activities of a 
modern church are a mistake.” 

“Not a mistake exactly,” said my friend. 
“These things ye ought to have done and not 
to have left the others undone.’ But I do mean 
that no matter how busy and brilliant a piece of 
organized activity is represented by his church 
a minister must find time to think and read and 
then to think and read again. This kind of spirit 
cometh not in but by brooding and patient medi- 
tation.” 


86 Tue Lion iw His DEN 


“That’s a fascinating council of perfection,” 
I countered. “But if you had to do it—” 

“Tf I had to do it, I’d do it,” declared the Lion 
with flashing eyes. 

I remembered all his fight with pain and the 
wonderful life he had lived as a student in spite 
of it. 

“Yes,” I admitted, “I believe you would.” 

“And a good start for our thin and efficient 
young men will be to read Dr. Hutton,” declared 
the Lion. ‘And then to reread his books. You 
only taste a real book when you read it. It is 
when you reread it and dream over it that it 
actually tells you its secret. The next best thing 
to having a ripe mind is to follow in the trail of 
a ripe mind. You can do that with Dr. Hutton. 
The masterpieces of the ages keep peering at you 
from between his phrases. But they are always 
made his own. His feet are always in the clover 
produced by other minds. But he makes his own 
paths. And he believes with simplicity and pas- 
sion in the things which will really reconstruct 
a man and remake society. If you discern the 
times with him you will do a bit better than that. 
You will begin to discern eternity.” 

I walked away with one phrase ringing in my 
ears. “Discerning eternity.” ‘That would surely 
be a good way to begin to make the most of time. 


CHAPTER XXII 


An AMERICAN NOVELIST 


books on the little table beside his bed. 

all of them were by Dorothy Canfield. 
The first was “The Bent Twig.” The second 
was “The Squirrel Cage.” The third was 
“The Brimming Cup.” ‘There was a whimsical 
light in my friend’s eye as he saw me looking at 
these books. 

“Did you tell me the other day that I ought to 
pay more attention to contemporary fiction?” 
he asked. 

“Not quite that,” I replied. “You manage to 
get some real contact with the whole procession of 
brightly groomed new books. But you did say 
something disrespectful about a book I value 
rather highly and I think I did spring to its 
defense.” 

The Lion was smiling now. 

“At any rate I won’t say anything disrespect- 
ful about Dorothy Canfield,” he said. “And for 


the comfort of a certain very enthusiastic Ameri- 
87 


ag other day I found the Lion with three 


88 : Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


can I will even admit that I think she has notable 
command of her materials and works after the 
fashion of a true artist.” 

He picked up “The Bent Twig,” as he spoke. 

“Now here,” he said, “is a really significant 
document on the philosophy of education which 
manages to be a rattling good story at the same 
time. A good deal of education has consisted in 
a process of making up students’ minds for them. 
In this tale you see some children gradually 
trained in those powers of analysis and those 
capacities to respond to the real meaning of 
things which prepare them to meet the days of 
crisis with a certain creative energy and strength. 
They do not have sets of rules by which to meet 
life. They do have vital and trained personality 
which can be trusted to get into the meaning of 
things and act in the light of it. There is no 
flmching. There is no evasion. And you breathe 
freely at last as you see the emerging of per- 
sonality which can be trusted.” 

Now the Lion was holding *““The Squirrel Cage” 
in his hand. 

‘This is a book of protest,” he said, continuing 
his mood of analysis. “It is an indictment of the 
efficiency which isn’t efficient, and of the nervous 
social intensity which is so busy living that it 
destroys the capacity for the enjoyment of life. 


An AmeErRICAN NoveE.List 89 


‘The Squirrel Cage’ is an attack on the hectic in 
the name of the simple and normal. It is an 
attack upon an over-strained and artificial life 
in the name of a life of quiet fullness and power. 
It has interest and insight and a flash of tragedy. 
It is a sign at the corner of the street where the 
railroad crosses and it says; ‘Stop! Look! 
Listen! ” 

My friend lay perfectly still for a moment. 
Then he reached for “The Brimming Cup.” 

“But here is the best of them all,” he declared. 
“Do you know I was almost afraid to read ‘The 
Brimming Cup.’ I knew that it was a study of the 
day when a happily married woman begins to 
feel the wear and strain of her home life and 
suddenly sees an open door leading to a life of 
infinite artistic and esthetic allurement. It is the 
sort of book anybody could write badly. And 
there aré so many kinds of mistakes the author 
might make that one shudders to think of them. 
The book might be merely conventional, saying 
the proper things without ever lifting the real 
problems. It might be the expression of a subtle 
lawlessness over-emphasizing the burdens of the 
life of the home and never facing the brutal 
selfishness which wants all the glow of life with- 
out ever facing its responsibilities. It might be 
an honest analysis which never leads to a true 


90 THe Lion 1x His DEN 


solution. It might keep the woman loyal and yet 
leave her with spirit clogged and heavy and with- 
out true inspiration. It might be guilty of a 
dozen sorts of bad taste and more sorts of bad 
portrayal of character. And all of these things 
‘The Brimming Cup’ triumphantly escapes. It 
deals with a problem without ever becoming a 
problem novel. It is as honest as nature and as 
clean as the noble movement of a really whole- 
some mind. Right in the midst of multitudes of 
people whose emancipation takes the form of be- 
heving that the home cannot survive, this book 
is thrown as a triumphant challenge. A woman of 
infinite richness of personality and exquisite play 
of temperament, with a strong and steady and 
loyal husband comes to the place where the first 
pressure of years, the first thrusts of dissillusion- 
ment and the first vague outcry for the gratifica- 
tion of taste instead of the meeting of responsi- 
bility are coincident with the appearance of a 
brilliant man of singularly magnetic personality, 
of audacious energy and of great wealth. The 
woman meets her problem. She has no artificial 
help. She is driven to face the actual realities. 
Even her husband refuses to ask her loyalty unless 
she can give her whole personality with it. Every 
subtle sophistry which the decadent mind has 
invented is brought adroitly to her mind. She 


An AmeErican Nove.ist 91 


is driven into a desert of lonely struggle where 
she must fight her battle to its very end. And 
there she finds that her whole growing personality 
demands her home and her husband and her 
children. She discovers that the way declared 
to be the way of emancipation would be the way 
to the death of every delicate and gracious thing 
in her life. She discovers that the real flowers — 
grow out of the actual soil of every-day life and 
loyalty. And so in the full richness of a life 
which has seen its own meaning and its own end- 
less possibilities she turns from the heat of a 
devastating fever to the permanent warmth of 
wholesome living. She discovers that fresh in- 
spiration is on the side of discipline and faithful- 
ness to responsibility. She discovers that the 
great moment of love is not the hour of its first 
wondering adventure but the hour of its wise and 
gracious maturity.” 

I was watching the Lion closely while he talked. 
And the light on his face was more revealing than 
his words, 


CHAPTER XXIII 


Tuer Way or THE PREACHERS 


said the Lion. 

There were several volumes of the Yale 
lectures on preaching lying on the table beside 
his bed. Among them I observed Sylvester 
Horne’s “Romance of Preaching.” ‘Then beside 
the Yale collection was Dr. Parkes Cadman’s 
‘‘Ambassadors of God.” 

“You have been reading about them too,” I 
remarked. 

“Oh, I always read about preachers,” said the 
Lion. ‘For years I have read every volume of 
the Yale series upon its appearance. But I have 
been thinking just now about contemporary 
preachers and their problems.” 

The Lion held Dr. Cadman’s book in his hand 
for a moment, looking at the title. 

“TI wish I could be sure that they all knew that,” 
he said. “I wish I could be entirely certain that 
they all know that they are ambassadors of God.” 


The Lion has a characteristic way of picking 
92 


“| HAVE been thinking about preachers,” 


. Tue Way or tHe PREACHERS 93 


up a phrase and giving it an entirely fresh po- 
tency by the way in which he pronounces it. We 
sat silent for a moment and the magic of his 
tones seemed to fill the words which made up the 
title of Dr. Cadman’s book, 

Then the Lion went on: 

“But I have been thinking not so much about 
the ambassador’s relation to the court from 
which he comes as about his relation to the country | 
in which he lives. For the ambassador must be at 
home in two lands. He must be at home in the 
land whose credentials he bears. And he must 
make a real and hearty place for himself in the 
land of his official duties.” 

“You think there is danger of his getting his 
loyalties confused?” I hazarded. 

“That’s just the point,” declared the Lion. 
‘Some preachers are actually unable to speak in 
the language of the land where they dwell. They 
have a heavenly message. But they have no 
speech in which to deliver it. And some men 
have become wonderful experts in the very last 
movement of the land where they are living. But 
in the meantime they have lost all vital connection 
with that invisible country of the spirit whose 
sanctions they represent.” 

‘You mean that a preacher can get a vocabu- 
lary and many a point of contact from his en- 


94 Tuer Lion In His DEN 


vironment but that he must go somewhere else 
for his message?” I asked. 

“Partly that. And partly something just a 
little different. There is a sense in which a 
preacher gets a part of his message from his 
environment. If a man lives in a time when the 
conscience of men is awaking as to the urgency of 
social problems he must take advantage of that 
new awareness. He must utilize every growing 
insight as to the duty of men to form an organic 
brotherhood. In that sense he receives a part of 
his message from his environment. But the op- 
portunity, which the mind and the conscience and 
the heart of his contemporaries gives, must be an 
introduction and a beginning. He must see the 
insights of his time in the light of larger relation- 
ships. He must gladly welcome its forward move- 
ments and he must interpret them in the light of 
the whole purpose of God.” 

“Do you think then that there is no place for 
the man who becomes the prophet of some aspect 
of Christian truth?” 

“Far from that. The great reforms must have 
their particular voices in the pulpit. And every 
forward movement will produce its effective 
leaders whose very names will at last suggest the 
thought of the movement. But I would have 
these men always alive to the danger of the 


Tur Way oF THE PREACHERS 95 


isolated virtue. I would have them remember 
that no one movement can save the world. I would 
have them speak always with deep respect of the 
men who are emphasizing other aspects of Chris- 
tian truth. And I would have the church so 
keen about producing men of the largest Christian 
perspective that there are always men in positions 
of commanding leadership whose outstanding 
characteristic is that they see life steadily and ~ 
that they see it whole. You must have men who 
have the mind of John the Baptist. But you are 
never safe unless they are followed by men who 
have the mind of Jesus.” 

“Is there not danger that this man who is 
always trying to see the whole sweep of Christian 
truth will be so busy trying to say everything 
clearly that he will say nothing effectively?” 

The Lion smiled at that. 

“Only when he substitutes classification for 
vital thinking,” he replied. ‘A man can grow all 
kinds of flowers in his garden. He may also press 
all kinds of dead flowers and construct an amazing 
herbarium. I am not pleading for the man who 
slays truth for the purpose of arranging it in 
orderly fashion. 'The man who sees truth in 
large perspective may still see it alive.” 

“But is it not easy for this philosopher in the 


96 Tur Lion in His DEN 


pulpit to use his desire for largeness of view in 
such a way as to evade his practical responsi- 
bility? May he not become content with putting 
forth a general view of right when the world needs 
a concrete condemnation of wrong? And even 
when he does not do that may he not become an 
Erasmus when the world needs a Luther?” 

The Lion had the light in his eye which some- 
times came in the midst of a vigorous mental 
tussle. 

‘All those rocks his ship must avoid,” he re- 
plied. ‘‘He may wreck his vessel upon any one 
of them. But it is still true that the passionate 
prophet of a single truth must always be supple- 
mented by the prophet of the whole of the Chris- 
tian faith if we are to be saved from reaction and 
disillusionment at last. The whole gospel is vaster 
than any of our splendidly earnest party posi- 
tions. And the best thing about it is that it 
includes them all.” 

“J suppose then that you would admit both 
Billy Sunday and Professor Rauschenbusch to 
ordination for a prophetic ministry?” I suggested. 

‘Without a doubt,” said the Lion, “and I 
would feel terribly anxious about a church which 
did not combine evangelical passion with social 
enthusiasm. But why did you choose Billy Sun- 


Tue Way or THE PREACHERS O7 


day to represent the evangelistic type of preach- 
ing?” 

I smiled back at the Lion when he asked this 
question. And that ended the discussion for the 
day. 


CHAPTER XXIV 


“Tar Hicn Way” 


about religion,” observed the Lion. 
He was holding in his hand Mrs. 
Caroline Atwater Mason’s book, “The High 
Way.” 

“And rather a number have been written about 
theology,” I threw in. 

My friend smiled. His eyes turned to a table 
upon which lay J. Henry Shorthouse’s “John 
Inglesant,” Walter Pater’s “Marius the Epi- 
curean,” Mrs. Charles’s “The Schénberg-Cotta 
Family,” Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s “Robert Els- 
mere,” Mrs. Margaret Deland’s “John Ward 
Preacher,” and James Lane Allen’s “Reign of 
Law.” 

‘It’s an odd collection,” I observed. The Lion 
ran his hand over the books. 

“Yes, you have a good many approaches. You 
have religion and the love of beauty, religion and 
spiritual democracy, religion and criticism, re- 


ligion and science—all worked into the passion 
98 


oe ‘ GREAT many novels have been written 


“THe Hicno Way” 99 


and the pain of the human story as the novelist 
has told the tale. Some of these books have the 
secret of life in them. Others are neither great 
nor profoundly vital. But they all have their 
interest. And now comes Mrs. Caroline Atwater 
Mason to preach the doctrine of the fundamental- 
ist by means of a parable of contemporary life.” 

I had settled back into a chair waiting for my 
friend to set forth his thoughts. 

“Mrs. Mason is a practiced writer. She has 
written well and sometimes very nobly. And no 
one can doubt her sincerity or her Christian pur- 
pose in this piece of eager and intense writing. 
The story moves with a swing of interest. Many 
of the characters live. And because things which 
tear men’s hearts are seen in action in this book 
it will be very widely read.” 

The Lion looked through the window where a 
bright glow of sunlight fell upon the snow. He 
waited for a moment then he went on: 

“You can never really defend the truth by re- 
fusing to subject it to the most searching tests. 
No doubt there are elements in the modern criti- 
cism of the Bible which are tentative and which 
will be unable to hold their own. But the cure 
of criticism is always more adequate criticism. 
You only repel an honest mind when you suggest 
even by implication that the candid scholar is a 


100 Tuer Lion in His Den 


menace to the faith. Mrs. Mason has read a 
good deal. But after all she has plunged into a 
great theme with all the valor of ignorance. She 
gives no hint of all the gracious and spiritually 
upbuilding work of such scholars as A. B. David- 
son, Canon Driver, and Sir George Adam Smith. 
It really seems a pity that her hardly driven lads 
in the theological seminary had never heard of 
the men in whose lives piety and critical attain- 
ment and prophetic vitality moved hand in hand. 
There is a certain lack of entire intellectual 
honesty in her treatment of the social passion 
which is one of the most nobly Christian things in 
the contemporary church. She discusses it as if 
it is only the by-product of a ministerial life 
which is spiritually bankrupt. One wonders if 
Mrs. Mason has ever read one of the books of 
Professor Rauschenbusch. And is it quite candid 
to write as if the moral lawlessness of our time 
has its brief and sufficient explanation in the 
critical and doctrinal positions of our theological 
seminaries?— And by what fatal lapse of ethical 
good taste did Mrs. Mason allow the young hero, 
so much wiser than his theological professor, to 
become engaged to a girl he did not love as a 
result of a moment’s flash of vivid boyish feeling? 
A little simple manliness would have saved this 
likable chap from the most unpleasant experience 


“THe Hien Way” 101 


which is narrated regarding his life. Is it just 
fair to capitalize all the hatred of Germany which 
the war produced and to utilize this to further 
the cause of an enthusiastic piece of religious 
propaganda? If modern criticism produced the 
war what was its share in the winning of the war? 
Does Mrs. Mason forget that every English and 
Scottish Theological College of any standing has 
welcomed the critical results of modern Biblical 
study? ‘The colors are flung on the canvas most 
vividly. The lines are drawn sharply. All this 
one concedes to Mrs. Mason. But she has been 
unfortunate enough to lose touch with the facts 
and the realities involved in the situation once 
and again.” 

‘You seem hostile enough,” I began when my 
friend paused. 

“Oh, that doesn’t cover the whole case,” replied 
the Lion. “If all criticism is not extreme, and 
all German critical scholarship is not of the devil, 
and all social passion is not the affectation of un- 
spiritual minds, it still remains true that Mrs. 
Mason has put her finger upon many a real 
plague spot, that what she says is often true of 
individuals if not fair as a universal indictment, 
and it is also true that her passionate discussion 
is sure to make us think. It will send us on a 
journey to find the facts for ourselves.” 


102 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 





We were silent for a moment. Then my friend 
said his last word for the day. ‘After all it is 
easier to produce scholars than to produce 
prophets. And the theological schools must not 
lose the secret of prophecy while they are winning 
the spurs of scholarship. 


CHAPTER XXV 


CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY 


One was “Christian and Social Science,” 

by Professor Charles A. Ellwood. The 
other was Bishop Charles D. Williams’s “The 
Gospel of Fellowship”—the Cole Lectures at Van- 
derbilt University for the year 1923. There was 
a look of quiet meditation upon his face as he 
scanned the two volumes. 

“The real man,” he began sententiously, ‘“‘is 
the one who knows how to get things together. 
Ideas are being thrown out all the while which 
supplement each other and can never become com- 
pletely effective unless they are united. Yet they 
have the most astonishing way of keeping apart. 
In the old days when I traveled about a good 
deal I used to watch two men, who made a daily 
trip from a suburban town into a big city, as they 
entered the train. Each was the very incarna- 
tion of a significant idea. And each was quite in- 
complete without the thing the other represented. 


Yet they were not even friends. They said a 
103 


M « friend held two books in his hand. 


104 Tse Lion 1n His Den 


civil ‘good morning’ and kept their ideas apart.” 

I was chuckling by this time at a diverting 
thought which the Lion had suggested. 

“It would be a rather novel social evening if 
we could get a well-assorted company of people 
really to introduce their ideas to each other,” I 
remarked. 

My friend smiled. 

“IT know what you are thinking,” he said, “there 
are many people who pack up their ideas in some 
sort of invisible kit bag and smile and smile at 
each other without ever holding intelligent con- 
versation. And as it is with ideas so it is with 
books. Usually even a fine book is a noble frag- 
ment. It needs.the company of another book. 
Sometimes it needs the company of a whole 
library.” 

We sat silent for a moment each busy with his 
own thoughts. Then the Lion went on: 

“Take these two books. Professor Ellwood 
has done a clear and honest and capable piece of 
work. It has just the qualities necessary to ap- 
peal to the scientific mind. It translates Chris- 
tian ethics mto the scientific vernacular. And it 
gives a place to elements which some provincial 
men of science have not recognized as important. 
One is immensely grateful for this able and effec- 
tive piece of analysis.” 


CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY 105 


My friend turned the book over once or twice 
and then put it upon the table beside him. 

“Now this book of Bishop Williams’s,” he 
continued, “‘this last will and testament of a great 
leader, does not have the qualities which give 
such distinction to Professor Ellwood’s work. It 
is alive with passion. It is glowing with the 
prophetic spirit. It is swept by great enthu- 


siasms. It is as honest as the work of Professor . 


Ellwood. But it is honesty set on fire and the 
blaze and the heat of it give one the sense of vivid 
conflagration. The one book is a military 
manual; the other is a call to arms. The one is a 
mathematical analysis; the other is an orchestra 
which has turned mathematics into the poetry of 
great music. And the thing I am saying is that 
either book 1s incomplete without the other. We 
need the analysis. We need the prophecy. We 
need the call to arms. And we need the military 
manual.” 

When I left my friend I carried the two books 
under my arm. 

“Prepare for the nuptials of poise and 
passion,” I called back as I left the recom.” 

“By their fruits ye shall know them,” the Lion 
shot after me just as I closed the door. 


CHAPTER XXVI 


Tur Romance or Maps 


Lion. 
“You look as if you have found it a bit 
exciting,” I threw back at him. 

“Exciting is just the word,” stoutly asserted 
my friend. “The fact is, I don’t know anything 
else so exciting as a map except the people who 
make maps.” 

“And who are they?” I countered. 

“Everybody,” declared the Lion, oracularly. 

There must have been some amusement in my 
eyes as I replied: “Oh, come now! With all the 
triumphs of democracy you can’t claim quite so 
much as that. Not many pens make the lines 
which really change the maps of the world. A 
good many people blindly fight for the lines when 
they are made. But the map makers are only a 
little group of people who sit like kings upon the 
summits of the mountains of the world.” 

“Not quite so much rhetoric,” growled the 


Lion, ‘“‘and a few more facts.” 
106 


“é ] °VE been thinking about maps,” said the 


Tue Romance or Maps 107 


“All right,” I returned, “I'll remove the 
rhetoric if you will supply the facts.” 

The Lion looked almost affectionately at the 
big globe which was always within reach beside 
his bed. 

“These supermen,” he began, “who according 
to your statement make the maps are not so 
powerful as you think. They really do little 
more than to register an opinion which they are 
not powerful enough to resist. A thousand 
prejudices and hopes and fears rise from the 
common life. And as they rise they become so 
potent that they cut their way right through the 
hardest mind. Even in an autocracy it is far 
more true than men have dared to think, that 
absolute authority moves within very definitely 
defined limits. A really successful autocrat has 
always been a man who knew absolutely well 
what he could not do and did not attempt it.” 

*“*A few more paradoxes like that and I'll de- 
clare that you have become a full-blooded Ivish- 
man,” I threw in. 

My friend smiled. But the steam was up and 
he was not to be diverted. “In a backward people 
the prejudices and deep superstitions of the 
masses are on the throne. In an immature 
democracy the opinion of the people controls. 
And in a fully developed republic the matured 


108 Tue Lion 1n His Den 


and disciplined convictions of the people deter- 
mine the national action. When the great tide of 
popular will gets in motion not even an autocracy 
has ever been able to resist it.” 

The Lion paused and looked again at his globe. 

“And the bearing of all this upon maps,” he 
said, “is just this: The people make the maps. 
The man who deeply influences public opinion is 
the man who really stands at the place of power. 
The maps are in a pretty bad state as it is. And 
it is principally because the people have decided 
about them without really understanding them. 
People ought to spend hours looking at maps. 
They ought to have dreams about maps in the 
night, and day dreams about them when they are 
awake. They ought to follow the river courses 
and climb the mountains of the world. They 
ought to know its highlands and its desert plains. 
They ought to picture in their minds its islands 
and its multitudinous seas. They ought to think 
and feel and study their way into a knowledge of 
what all this means for men and women and 
little children. They ought to see what the lines 
of division which men have drawn have really 
meant in human experience. They ought to see 
the glory of maps and the shame of maps and 
their hope and their fear.” 

“What about the rhetoric now?” I broke in. 


Tue Romance oF Maps 109 


The Lion was unabashed. 

“Oh, this is rhetoric based upon facts and not 
rhetoric which is a substitute for facts,” he de- 
clared urbanely. He lay perfectly quiet for a 
moment. Then he said seriously, “If a map of the 
world could be made the most fascinating object 
in every home there would be a new hope for 
civilization itself,” 


CHAPTER XXVII 
TuHreE LirrLte Booxs 


HREE little books were lying on the bed 
beside the Lion. One was “The Reason- 
ableness of the Christian Faith,’ by 

Principal D. S. Cairns, of Aberdeen. The 
second was “I'he Divine Initiative,” by Professor 
H. R. Mackintosh, of Edinburgh. The third was 
“The Universality of Christ,” by Bishop Wiliam 
Temple, of Manchester. There was a curiously 
contented look upon the Lion’s face. 

“T’ve been having a perfectly good time,” he 
said. ‘These are not very large books. But they 
are wonderfully fruitful. They are wonderfully 
alike. And they are very unlike. They are full 
of the endeavor to reapproach Christianity in the 
light of all the vicissitudes of mind and body and 
heart through which we have passed. They are 
alive to the finger tips with the knowledge of con- 
temporary thought and even of contemporary 
moods. And each has something else. Each 
gives you a sense of the actual presence of the 


light never seen on sea or land.” 
110 


Turee Lirrte Booxs 111 


I looked at my friend as he lay quietly thmk- 
ing. The marks of years of pain were upon his 
face. But there was something more. I was 
willing to have him talk to me about the light 
never seen on sea or land. 

At the moment he was holding Principal 
Cairns’s book in his hand. 

“It has the most wonderful flashes of insight,” 
he said. ‘Listen to this: ‘I believe that Christ’s 
unbounded love for men sprang out of this that 
they were the likest beings to his Father that he 
found in all the world.’ Can’t you see the lonely 
eager spirit of Jesus swept by the consciousness 
of the perfect loving personality of God, caring 
for human persons because they had a spark 
which somehow suggested the Divine?” 

While he talked my friend was turning the 
pages of the book. Now his face brightened, as 
he read aloud: 

*“* “Tt has truly been said by a great scholar of 
the science of religion that the best definition of 
a saint is that he is one who makes it easier for 
other men and women to believe in God.’ Pro- 
fessor Cairns quoted that because it expresses 
his own spirit,” the Lion went on. “The book 
is rich in that sense of the human values of the 
Divine which transforms the very genius of re- 
ligion. It is full of great argument conducted at 


112 Tur Lion 1n His DEN 


a lofty level. It is written in a style which once 
and again bursts into flame. And it makes re- 
ligion speak in the very terms of the life of to- 
day.” 

By this time I had picked up “The Divine 
Initiative” and was peering along the paths of 
its pages. The Lion had marked the book in his 
individual way. Soon following his markings I 
was reading these words: 

“The inspiration of the Bible means in 
practice that we can feed our religious life year 
in and year out on its contents and yet find no 
end to the treasure; and in practice the divinity 
of Christ means at least this—that throughout a 
lifetime we find Him to be for us the illimitable 
source of the life of God.’?” And a little later 
these sentences caught my eye. 

‘**“No man can indulge in apathy toward the 
working of God in ages behind us without suc- 
cumbing also to apathy regarding the world 
around us. If our religion neglects history it will 
neglect society as well.’ ” 

The Lion listened while I read aloud. 

“Those are good bits,” he said. “But it is the 
whole that counts the most. As you read the 
book you feel more and more deeply that there 
are two ways of regarding religion. You can 
regard it as man’s quest for God. Or you can 





Turee Lirrite Booxs 113 





regard it as God’s quest for man. In the most 
triumphant and glowing fashion he makes you 
feel that religion 1s God’s eager and chivalrous 
pursuit of man. That is what he means by the 
divine initiative.” 

Then my friend turned to Bishop Temple’s 
book. 

“Here is a harder bit of reading,” he said. 
“The dialectic is a little more in evidence. The 
resources of erudition are a little more visible. 
The style has less play of sunlight. But it is a 
most arousing book. There are penetrating ob- 
servations which set one going on fruitful paths. 
Take this: ‘There is one God; and if Jesus is 
the express image of the person of the Father, 
so he is the perfect portrait of the Holy Ghost 
and when we want to know who is this Holy 
Spirit that prompts us in our own souls, we shall 
read the Gospels just as we do when we seek to find 
out who is the world’s creator.’ On another level 
of philosophical thinking take this: ‘It is worth 
while to point out that we cannot choose at all 
unless we can with practical certainty count on 
the consequences of our action. It is the normal 
fixity of natural law which makes possible any 
valuable freedom of choice!’ ” 

“They tell the gospel of a Christ-like God,” 
he declared. ‘They insist in interpreting the 





114 Tue Lion rn His DEN 


lower from the standpoint of the higher and not 
the higher from the standpoint of the lower. 
And they glow with the certainty that when you 
know God as you see him in the face of Christ 
you have the secret of the universe. It is the 
secret of a new personality. And it is the secret 
of a new society. But then you will have to read 
the books for yourself.” 

And so I carried the three volumes off under 
my arm. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 
SHERMAN OF ILLINOIS 


HE summer resort where the Lion was 
TT stopping was crowded. But he had found 
ample quarters in a pleasant cottage 
which overlooked the sea and I found him in a 
couch on a little piazza which was all his own 
during his stay. The air from the ocean was 
moving briskly about and the effect of the tonic 
atmosphere was to be seen in a bit of unwonted 
color on my friend’s face and a quick vital light 
in his eye. 

“Where is it?” I asked. 

The Lion drew forth a book from somewhere 
on the couch. 

“Here it is,” he said. “But I didn’t intend to 
begin with it. I was looking over the sea and 
thicking of certain streets in London and Paris 
and certain book shops where a man may really 
expect to turn up a great and happy surprise.” 

For a little while we sat chatting of favorite 
haunts in great towns of the old world. Then 


I reached for the book which the Lion still held 
115 


116 Tuer Lion 1x His Den 





in his hand. It was Professor Stuart P. Sher- 
man’s volume of essays, “Americans.” ‘Then I 
leaned back in my chair. 

“I’ve been wanting to hear you talk about 
Sherman for rather a while,” I said. 

The Lion looked out toward the sea. 

“It’s all wonderfully done,” he said. “This 
middle-western professor of English literature 
has all the distinction we once associated with the 
most veritable intellectual Brahmin of Boston. 
He knows the great essayists. He is at home in 
the eighteenth century. He is a man of really 
rich and varied erudition. And he has taken 
time to read with patience and understanding the 
writings which tell the tale of the American ex- 
periment in expression. He has a wholesome 
mind. And he is not without sound standards of 
taste. He is an American who has made the most 
distinguished English tradition his own and with 
the sly skill of a man who has spent no end of 
hours with the best English-speaking wits. He 
writes about our achievement as you can see it in 
Franklin and Emerson and Whitman and Haw- 
thorne and Joaquin Miller and Carnegie and 
Roosevelt and Paul More, incidentally paying his 
respects to the Adams Family. <A very highly 
evolved and delicately articulated mind applies 
itself to the analysis and the interpretation and 


SHERMAN OF ILLINOIS 117 


the criticism of these Americans. He can use 
words which bite. And he is not without words 
which caress. You would be glad to send a copy 
of this book to the editor of the literary supple- 
ment of the London Times.” 

“This is high praise,” I threw in. 

“Y’m not through yet,” returned the Lion. 
‘But there is more praise before I come to the 
damnatory clauses. As an antidote to the group 
of young intellectuals who are going about our 
cities naked and quite without shame nothing 
could be better than the writing of Professor 
Sherman. The raw vulgarity of Mr. Mencken 
is seen with singular clarity in the clear light 
furnished by this writer of highly disciplined and 
distinguished prose. A number of prophets turn 
out to be nothing more than very bad boys with 
mud over their faces when Professor Sherman 
applies to them the tests of his searching analysis. 
You begin to feel that after all the new Dr. 
Johnson does not have to be a brute in order to 
deserve a Boswell. This knightly gentleman with 
the swift sword does a bit of work whose brilliant 
execution is a delight to see.” 

The Lion sat still for a moment. 

‘““Now for the ‘howevers’ and the ‘buts,’?” I 
suggested. 


118 Tue Lion ins His Den 


The Lion reached for the book and fumbled 
through the pages of the last essay. 

‘After all,” he said, “in a measure you can find 
the same fault with Sherman which he finds with 
Paul More. This book is a delight. But in a 
measure it is exotic. ‘The wealth of the author’s 
erudition, the sharp edge of his style, the sudden 
gleam of his satire, are pure joy, but it is not 
quite a joy which has caught the American flavor. 
Paul More is a cosmopolitan who lives in Amer- 
ica and writes about America. But the subtlest 
elements of American life slip through his fine 
mind and come away without visible form or ex- 
pression. The cosmopolitan whose varied wealth 
of mind is mastered and dominated by the subtle 
flavor of our own life and whose criticism with all 
its splendid expanse could be written nowhere 
but in America is not Professor Sherman. He 
loves his country. He reads its great books. But 
for all that he lives in an atmosphere which is not 
quite native.” 

Out on the sand at the moment I saw a friend 
of whom I had not had a glimpse for half a dozen 
years. As I excused myself to greet him, the 
Lion shot after me: 

“I only growl because I am happy. Just to 
have Sherman alive in America is a promise that 
intellectual jazz may give place to music.” 


SHERMAN OF ILLINOIS 119 


At that moment a band not far away began 
to play. And I am afraid it was jazz which fell 
upon our ears as an echo to the optimism of my 
friend. 


CHAPTER XXIX 
A Birv’s-Eve View or LITERATURE 


HE first volume of the “Outline of Litera- 
ture,” edited by Mr. John Drinkwater, 
was lying on the table beside the Lion 

when I entered his room the other day. His eye 
brightened with a certain amusement as he 
followed the direction of my gaze and the book 
came within his vision. 

“A book written for popular consumption 
ought to be very accurate,” he began oracularly. 

“And what mistakes rewarded the quest of the 
detective’s eye in this book of beautiful pictures 
and bright print?” I inquired. 

My friend extended his hand for the volume. 

“Take this as an example,” he said. And he 
read: “Apart from “The Book of the Dead,’ 
another Egyptian book, ‘The Precepts of Ptah- 
Hotep,’ is probably the oldest book in the world. 
Ptah-Hotep was born in Memphis and he lived 
about the year 2550 B.C. The immense age of 
this oldest book but one may be realized if it be 


remembered that it was written two thousand 
120 


A Brrp’s-Evt View oF Lirerature 121 


years before Moses (that puts Moses five hun- 
dred years before Christ and makes him in a 
sense a contemporary of the great age of Athens, 
chuckled the Lion) and two thousand years before 
the compilation of the Indian Vedas. It is two 
thousand five hundred years older than Homer 
and Solomon’s proverbs. That,” added the 
Lion, “makes Homer and Solomon practically 
contemporaries of Christ.” 

My friend turned over the pages of the volume 
rapidly. Then he went on: ‘And listen to this: 
Dante in ‘The Divine Comedy’ made Virgil his 
guide through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. 
What do you think of that choice bit of informa- 
tion? Virgil guiding Dante through heaven is a 
rather refreshing idea.” 

“That sort of mistake really ought not to be 
made,” I admitted. “Is that the best as well as - 
the worst you can say of the book?” 

The Lion lay back, thoughtfully pushing his 
head in upon his pillow. 

“IT admit I have put the worst first,” he replied. 
“As a matter of fact, it is a bright and graphic 
book which brings no end of important informa- 
tion about the history of literature within the 
range of people who would readily admit that 
they are not literary. It is full of interesting 
odds and ends of bookish knowledge. And it 


122 Tue Lion 1w His Den 


gives you a real sense of the spirit of many an 
author as well as the salient facts about him. 
You make some genuine contact with the great 
religious books of the world, you feel the genuine 
quality of the Greek spirit and the humanistic 
imitativeness of the Latin people. You move 
through the middle ages with a sufficient appre- 
hension of the sterility of the earlier centuries to 
feel the very breath of springtime which comes 
with the Renaissance. The quotations are made 
with a good deal of sympathy. And there are 
some admirable bibliographical notes. It is a 
good piece of clever journalism. But it is not a 
brooding and understanding interpretation of the 
adventure of the human mind in the realm of 
literary expression.” 

My friend was still for a moment. Then he 
spoke again: 

“IT have a dream of reading a book on the litera- 
ture of the world some day,” he said, “which will 
be the very pouring forth of the spirit of a man 
who has opened his mind to the companionship 
of all the ages. Just because he has taken into 
his own heart the ripe harvest of beauty in every 
great literature and, loving it, has made it his 
own, he will move very easily among the materials 
of his vast erudition. Each language and each 
nation and each age will have a personality of its 


A Bro’s-Eve View or Lirerature 123 


own, in his mind. And all these things will be 
set forth in words as mellow and fragrant and 
beautiful as the story which they have to tell. At 
last humanity will seem a very wonderful person 
whose experiences at various stages and in various 
moods the literature of the world tells. And this 
biography of the human spirit will be one of the 
great books of the world.” 

I had almost moved my lips to say, “Well, why | 
don’t you write it?” when I knew in time that 
this was the one thing I must not say. So, in- 
stead, I ventured, “Perhaps your man of uni- 
versal erudition, your citizen of all the ages 1s 
at work on it somewhere now.” 

The Lion smiled a little sadly. 

“If that is true, no one will give the book a 
warmer welcome than I,” he said. 

I touched my friend’s shoulder lightly as I rose 
to go. 

“After all,” I said, “you do not need it. You 
have it in your mind and heart already.” And 
with his protests in my ear I passed out of the 
room. 


CHAPTER XXX 
Tuer Girts oF THE CHURCH TO THE WoRLD 


‘SY °VE been thinking about the Christian 
Church,” said the Lion. 
“Then you’ve had a good deal to think 
about,” I replied a bit flippantly, I fear. 

“That’s precisely the point,” replied the Lion. 
“If you move through the ages as you think about 
the Christian Church you find that the range and 
the versatility of the life which the Church has 
represented are quite astounding. The thing 
which came home to me in rather a new way was 
just the fact that the Christian Church is not 
provincial. It is cosmopolitan.” 

“Some of the vigorous young intellectuals in 
great American pulpits would hardly agree with 
you,” I suggested. 

“And the very fact that they are there would 
help to prove my point,” returned my friend. 
“There is hardly an American city which does 
not have more than one historic pulpit ringing 
with a voice alive with social passion, the vehicle 
of a mind which like an aeolian harp allows every 


wind of contemporary life to blow through it. 
124 


Tue GIFTS OF THE CHURCH TO THE WorztD 125 


It was so in the twelfth century with Abelard. It 
has been so more often than you would suppose. 
The church has been so near to human life that a 
history of the intellectual life of the church is of 
necessity a history of the whole mental life of the 
periods during which it has existed.” 

“But hasn’t the Church rather often been fight- 
ing against the vigorous life all about it?” I 
asked. 

“Some churchmen have usually fought against 
it. Others helped to produce it. Think of Roger 
Bacon in the thirteenth century. Think of Eras- 
mus in the sixteenth century. Think of Alfred 
Russel Wallace in the nineteenth century.” 

I sat silent for a moment followmg my agile 
friend through the centuries. Then I was about 
to speak. He checked me with a gesture. 

“Did you ever think,” he asked, “of the amaz- 
ing capacity the Church has shown of producing 
its own severest critics and of developing its own 
surgeons ready with the sharpest instruments to 
remove its malignant growths?” 

Then without waiting for me to reply the Lion 
went on: 

“If you study the monastic movements of the 
middle ages you will find that for every cor- 
ruption there is a powerful movement of reform. 
If you study the Protestant revolt you will see 


126 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 


that it is in essence the conscience of the Church 
applied to the sins of the Church. If you study 
the Wesleyan movement of the eighteenth century 
you will see that it is the spiritual life of the 
Church rebuking the Church’s lifelessness. It is 
tremendously significant that both Luther and 
Wesley were the product of the Church to which 
they came with such revolutionary power. And 
when we go back to the beginnings of our con- 
temporary social passion we find men like Charles 
Kingsley proving once more that some prophet of 
the Church is always on the watch-tower to de- 
tect the signs of the coming of a new dawn.” 

“The brethren of these progressive prophets 
have not always been entirely enthusiastic about 
their leadership,” I interjected. 

There was a little quiet mirth and a good deal 
of serious thought in my friend’s eye as he re- 
plied: 

“If you stop to think of it you will see that there 
is something to be said for the conservatives. The 
man who is thinking of the new life is rarely 
thinking of the old stability. The two types are 
both needed. ‘They supplement each other.” 
Then with one of his sudden flashing smiles the 
Lion shot this sentence at me: 

“Think how absurd a radical would be if there 
were no conservative for him to contradict?” 


Tue GIFts OF THE CHURCH TO THE WortD 127 


“You are an intolerable optimist today,” I 
threw back at him. ‘You will soon be developing 
a leaf from an old puritan divine and argue the 
necessity of hell to complete the felicity of heaven 
in a perfectly happy universe.” 

The Lion gave an expressive shrug as if that 
was reply enough. Then he became serious and 
said the last words I got from him that day. 

“Y’m not attacking. And I’m not defending. . 
I’m only saying that take it by and large the 
area of the Church has been as large as the area 
of life. The cathedral has had gargoyles. And 
sometimes crimes have been committed before its 
altars. But it has been a great cathedral for all 
that.” 

“Which sounds very much like defence in spite 
of your protests,” I called back as I went out of 
the door, 


CHAPTER XXXI 


TASTE AND DEMOCRACY 


T was a delightful summer day. The Lion 
was in the spot we called his outdoor study. 
It was a big porch looking out on the rear 
garden and so sheltered from observation and 
secure in a certain fine quiet. Vines were clamber- 
ing all about. The tables were full of books and 
magazine’. ‘The couch upon which my friend lay 
was so placed as to be near to pretty much every- 
thing he could possibly want. The green grass 
outside was full of a certain rich beauty. And 
the flowers in the garden tossed their heads in a 
gay riot of color. The Lion looked up as I came 
in from the heat and the rush of the life outside. 
*¢ “The world is too much with us,’ ” he quoted 
with a smile. ‘Come and brush the dust out of 
your mind, and see what a little quiet will do for 
the lines on your face. There’s a little bit of the 
Middle Ages hidden in this garden. It’s war- 
ranted to take you out of the hectic life of the 
twentieth century. Come and try it.” 


I looked down at his face with a bit of half- 
128 


TastE AND Democracy 129 


wistful envy. There was such a curiously vital 
quiet about him. And his eyes had deep wells 
of spiritual content. 

“It isn’t the garden,” I said, “it’s you. What 
would the thirteenth century be without Saint 
Francis.” 

But he would have none of my praise, not even 
when indirectly expressed. He picked up a book 
which lay beside him. 

“I’ve been reading about the middle west,” he 
said. “It’s rather right to call it the ‘Valley of 
Democracy,’ isn’t it?” 

“Sinclair Lewis would call it—” I began. 

My friend interrupted. “Why read Sinclair 
Lewis when you can read Vachel Lindsay? Why 
read the literature of scorn when you can read 
the literature of understanding? Why read 
about the old clothes of the middle west when 
you can read about its awakening spirit?” 

“You are fairly keen about Vachel Lindsay, I 
observe,” I suggested. 

The Lion responded at once. 

“Well, rather,” he admitted. “You see when 
Edgar Lee Masters wrote the ‘Spoon River 
Anthology’ I began to fear that nobody who had 
felt the beat of its heart would really tell us 
about the Mississippi Valley. The ugly things 
and the sordid things and the hot beastly things 


130 Tuer Lion 1n His Den 


were seen clearly enough by Masters. But the 
thing which gives wings to this great inland coun- 
try he did not see at all. Then Vachel Lindsay 
showed us the other side of the picture. All the 
while you knew that he was looking at something 
very noble and very full of lofty promise even 
when he gave a hint instead of a description. He 
had all sorts of sympathy. He could take you 
on a sudden trip into the barbaric soul of an un- 
tutored race and let you see its spirit reaching 
out toward spiritual heights. He could bring the 
quality of a civilization with a thousand delicate 
dreams of beauty into the night dullness of a 
Chinese laundry. He could set the hopes of the 
Salvation Army to high lyrical music. But best 
of all this democrat of cosmopolitan sympathies 
felt the possibilities and the promise of the great 
middle west. He did not patronize it. He did 
not analyze its weaknesses with cynical scorn. He 
listened to the beat of its heart. He watched the 
play of its mind. He felt the outreach of its 
spirit. And all the while he was finding more to 
believe in and care about, more upon which to 
build a great hope. He knew that sometimes the 
Valley of Democracy is inarticulate. But he was 
sure that it was not empty of meaning. He was 
convinced that it was rich with unexpressed ideal- 
ism and laden with uninterpreted dreams of 


Taste AND DEMocRACY 131 


beauty. He brought to the middle west the simple 
reverence of a child of genius. And so the great 
wide land began to tell him its secrets.” 

“Walter Pater would have seen very little of all 
that in our western plains with their ugly little 
villages,” I remarked when the Lion had paused 
for breath. 

My friend lay silent for a moment with a little 
wrinkle of thought upon his brow. , 
“You are right about Pater,” he said at length. 
“Marius the Epicurean would not have found the 
middle west a homeland for his spirit. But that 
is just the limitation of a type of mind so 
sophisticated that it can only recognize beauty in 
certain stately garments, and a taste whose dis- 
ciplined self-consciousness can only recognize 
charm in a marble finish. There is a touch of 
decadence about the refinement which cannot 
pierce the rude realities of a rugged and growing 
country to see the sound and strong spirit which 
moves through its life with a rhythm all its own. 
There is a variety of classic taste which consists 
principally in despising what does not conform 
to its own rules. And it comes at last to lose all 
contact with the creative realities of the human 
spirit. It is only when classic taste is wedded to 
the endless expectations and the exhaustless hopes 
of the romantic spirit that a man is safe. With- 


132 Tuer Lion 1x His Den 


out this the classic mind comes to a hard rigidity 
at last.” 

“You are making a good many concessions con- 
sidering your own austere taste in a good many 
matters,” I ventured. 

The Lion smiled easily. 

“Some day we'll learn that there is no reason 
why sternly disciplined taste cannot be combined 
with hearty human sympathy,” he declared. 

Then a light came in my friend’s eye. He 
moved a little restlessly. And then he spoke the 
words which ended our talk for the day. 

*“Can’t you see it?” he asked. “Here we are 
with all sorts of people from everywhere living 
together. Think of all the traditions. Think of 
all the dreams. Think of all the varied capacities. 
Think of all the kinds of mind. And here we 
are in the wide spaces of the middle west busy with 
the great adventure of living and thinking and 
making a republic of the mind and heart. If we 
respect each other and try to travel the wonder- 
ful paths from mind to mind and keep dreaming 
our great dreams and hoping our great hopes, at 
last something very fine and beautiful is to come 
out of it all. It requires faith. And expectation. 
And insight. And patience. And the fire kept 
burning in one’s own heart. If you listen to the 


TASTE AND DEMOCRACY 133 


life of our great plains you will hear wonderful 
sounds. For it’s turning into music after all.” 

I went away quietly quoting to myself the lines 
of Lindsay: 


“Look in your own heart,’ she said, 
‘Aladdin’s lamp is there.’ ” 


CHAPTER XXXII 
Macuines AND THE Man 


| HE Lion had been very much impressed 

by Mr. Arthus Pound’s “The Iron Man 

in Industry.” For a number of weeks, he 
was always sure to bring it into every conversa- 
tion when I called to see him. “It is true enough,” 
he would say, ‘‘that there is more than one Iron 
Age. The first was the age of the skilled worker 
in iron and Mr. Pound is quite right in saying 
that we live in the era of the automatic machine. 
It fairly makes me dizzy to think of the pos- 
sibilities of this new age and some of them are not 
particularly pleasant. ‘The automatic machine 
makes possible the survival and the vital pro- 
ductivity of groups which went to the wall in the 
sterner days which lie behind. In some ways, the 
ideal worker at an automatic machine is a man 
who is underdeveloped mentally if you were think- 
ing merely in the terms of human values. One 
wonders sometimes if the automatic machine will 
at last deplete the personal and intellectual vigor 


of the race.” 
134 


MacuInes AND THE Man 185 


Then we would fall to discussing all the aspects 
of the intricate situation which the new machine 
age has produced and always we would come at 
last to the necessity that the worker at the auto- 
matic machine with his shorter hours and higher 
wages should be taught how to use his leisure in 
wise and productive and up-building fashion. 

It was in some such mood as these discussions 
produced that the Lion fell upon Sir Henry 
Jones’s fascinating little book, “Old Memories.” 
He was holding it in his hand when I came into 
his room one day and he held it out to me very 
eagerly. 

“T have known Sir Henry as a student of 
Browning,” he said. “I have known him as a 
philosopher and now at last I know him as a 
very fascinating human being. The account of 
the struggles of this Welsh boy for an education 
makes up the sort of tale which will put new fire 
and energy into the blood of every aspiring young 
man who reads it. The story of the two Welsh 
boys on a long walk between midnight and morn- 
ing, shaking hands as they promised each other 
that they would graduate from some university, 
deserves to achieve an immortality of its own. 
The picture of the simple Welsh home with such 
strange privation and yet such wonderful good 
humor, such fine content, and such capacity to 


136 Tue Lion 1x His Den 


build character gives one a new faith in the stuff 
of which a democracy is made.” 

I was turning over the pages of the book while 
the Lion talked. ‘How can you put the spirit of 
the boy who was te become Sir Henry Jones into 
the young fellows who are running automatic 
machines in so many of our factories and have 
never learned how to use their leisure?” I asked. 

“One way is to get the brightest of them to read 
‘Old Memories,’ ” replied my friend. 


CHAPTER XXXII 
SONNETS OF THE Cross 


T first I thought the Lion was asleep. 

Very quietly I picked up a book and sat 

down beside him. But before I had been — 

reading long he turned toward me. I put down 

the book and at once was arrested by something 
lustrous in his eyes. 

“TI have been living with twenty-six wonderful 
sonnets,” he observed. He handed to me a very 
tiny volume which bore the title, “Sonnets of the 
Cross,” by Thomas S. Jones, Jr. I turned to the 
first of the series and was quickly arrested by a 
line marked in the careful and individual way 
which characterized my friend. ‘The line ran 
thus, “The fragrance of a lost simplicity.” I 
found myself repeating it softly, each repetition 
seeming to unfold more perfectly its subtle music 
and its poignant suggestion. A little farther 
along in the same sonnet came these lines: 


“Autumn’s rich ruined splendor and soft haze— 
The memory of immemorial fires.” 


On I went and the Lion was quite content to 
137 


188 Tuer Lion 1x His Den 


have it so. Old saints lived their lives and 
wrought their wonders in the hearts and lives of 
men. Nature lived with a certain stainless wonder 
of mystical suggestion. And words caught old 
emotions and gave them a new potency so that 
they won the immortality which can be given when 
an understanding heart can command the perfect 
power of revealing phrases. The strange and 
quiet delicacy of it all, the beautiful and healing 
power of the very speech of these poems of ex- 
quisite artistry, the sense that a rare and gracious 
soul had put its very secret into phrases whose 
texture was almost as wonderful as the message 
they had to bear; the happy surprise with which 
one found that our own land had poured forth 
this subtle, distilled beauty of spiritual loveliness: 
all this quite possessed my mind as I went on and 
read every one of the twenty-six sonnets which 
the little book contains. Then I sat quite still 
and my friend who never breaks in upon a seminal 
silence uttered not a word. 

It was a lovely autumn afternoon and there was 
a touch of wistful farewell beauty about the land- 
scape which beyond the windows unfolded before 
one’s eye. But I was off in other ages and full 
of the pain and the rapture of other days. I read 
once more the chaste and noble words whose 
understanding music told the tale of Cadmon’s 


SONNETS OF THE Cross 139 


humiliation and of the glory of inspiration which 
swept over his spirit “ere the stars were folded in 
rose flame” at dawn. Buzzing wheels and re- 
volving belts and all the clicking efficiency of 
modern life seemed very far away and beauty like 
ripe fruit was hanging upon all the trees. At 
length I turned toward my friend: 

“If this is the sort of thing Americans are 
going to do and if this is the sort of thing other | 
Americans are going to appreciate there are 
great days ahead for the children of the old moral 
and spiritual adventurers.” 

“You have thought of that, too,” smiled back 
the Lion. “We have assembled the parts of 
countless automobiles. Here there is the as- 
sembling of the evasive and almost impalpable 
elements of a great and cleansing beauty. We 
are becoming morally and spiritually lonely in 
the midst of our success and our prosperity. And 
so we are ready to learn that deep humility which 
will give to the nation a greatness which it has 
never known.” 

The desire to aid in the diffusion of these golden 
bits of writing was already kindled within me. I 
took note of the fact that fifty cents would secure 
a copy of the little book. The Lion had a certain 
slow and whimsical amusement in his eye as he 
gave me the information. 


140 | Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


‘You are a brave man if you undertake propa- 
ganda for a fragrance,” he declared. 

“Tt is all a part of a very ancient merchandise,” : 
I laughed back. “And after all it was a frag- 
rance and not an idea which made possible the 
Renaissance.” 


CHAPTER XXXIV 
Tue Martrer or CHoice 


HE day had been particularly full of 
pressing and not entirely interesting 
work. I came to the evening with a rather 

heavy sense of weariness and depletion. So it © 
was natural enough that I made my way to the 
home of the Lion. 
He looked up with a bright light in his eye and 
quoted with a curious contagious gaiety. 
““The whole of the world was merry, 
One joy from the vale to the height, 


When the blue woods of twilight encircled 
The lovely lawns of light.’ ” + 


“You are determined that at this particular 
evening time there shall be music as well as light.” 
I remarked. 

“The light will fade but the music is to con- 
tinue,” countered the Lion. 

“Why so blithe tonight?” I asked as I took 
a chair beside the bed. 

“Just because I had to be very happy or very 


1A.E. Chap. 1, “Anthology of Modern Verse.” 
141 


142 Tuer Lion 1n His DEn 


sad,” replied the Lion simply. ‘‘Some days are 
like that. They scorn Aristotle’s golden mean. 
You can be full of gladness or you can be full of 
gloom. You have a choice. But it is a choice of 
extremes. And as you see my choice has been 
made with somewhat satisfactory results.” 

“Tt is doubtless easier to talk about it than to 
do it,” I ventured, probing just a little, which I 
will admit was just what ordinarily I did not do. 

The Lion apparently did not mind. At least 
he gave no sign of displeasure. Indeed he seemed 
willing to talk. “The words ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ 
scarcely fit the situation. It seems impossible 
until you do it and then it seems the most natural 
thing in the world to have done. I suppose the 
psychological basis for fatalism is just that all 
choices seem inevitable after they are made.” 

‘And in similar sort the basis for Calvinism 
ig-—” 

“That the moment the great decision is really 
made you feel as if it was done in eternity. You 
cannot imagine a world or a life in which God 
would not hold you fast for himself.” 

“And what of the people who are left out of 
this eternal divine choice.” 

“Oh, the Calvinist has never really dared to 
think of them. He has simply built a theology 
on the psychological experience involved in the 


Tue Marrer or CHOICE 143 


great acceptance. He really has nothing to say 
about those who are left out.” 

“Then the only valid—at least the only con- 
sistent—Calvinism, is the Calvinist turned inside 
out of the Universalist who believes that all men 
are included in the eternal choice and must make 
the great acceptance at last.” 

“What a dialectician you are_ tonight,” 
laughed the Lion, “I am afraid there are depths 
of personality which the Universalist has never 
probed. But he has a good heart and he can say 
more for himself logically than he sometimes 
says.” 

The bit of theological argument had quite re- 
freshed my spirits. The Lion says that when I 
am fairly worn out a syllogism before and after 
sleeping is sure to restore me. I have more faith 
in the sleep myself. But I will not deny that my 
friend’s prescriptions have their value. 

He was gazing straight at the ceiling now as if 
he saw something very engrossing there. 

“Personality is a richer thing than we have 
ever discovered,” he was saying. “You can’t 
fasten it in mechanical or mathematical formulas. 
You can chart what has happened by mathe- 
matics. You cannot chart the future of a per- 
sonal life. And that is the glory of the adventure 
of living.” 


144 THe Lion 1n His Den 


“You think there is no chart of the future?” I 
asked. 

“Well, I will qualify that,” said the Lion. 
“There is a chart dominated by a power called 
purpose. But purpose is freedom in action. And 
so you keep the sense of glad adventure.” 

I went home that night with the words “the 
sense of glad adventure” ringing in my ears. 


CHAPTER XXXV 
Intropucinc THE WortLp or LETTERS 


“<< HAVE been talking with the most delightful 
boy this afternoon,” said the Lion. His eyes 
were bright and I feared that he had been 

exciting himself too much. 

“Then you’d better rest for an hour and let 
me come back later,” I replied. 

“Don’t go just yet,” said the Lion. “I want 
to talk to you about this boy. MHe’s having a 
perfectly good time in high school. He’s sound 
asanut. His body is strong and lithe and grace- 
ful. He has a wonderfully appealing face, and 
eyes that look right into your soul. And best of 
all he has a mind quick and keen. He is fairly 
bristling with questions. And somehow you know 
that he has it in him to give himself tremendously 
to the right things when he finds them.” 

“Really, that’s something of a boy,” I inter- 
jected. ‘And of what did you talk?” 

The Lion had been coming to that. 

“This boy is a great reader,” he said. ‘‘He goes 


in for athletics tremendously and his muscles have 
145 


146 Tue Lion 1n His Den 





a sort of powerful yet silent movement. But he 
also goes in for reading. And he goes in for 
reading with all his might. One of these days 
he’ll have a summer and a winter house for his 
mind in every significant age of the world. Just 
now he has been reading three books. And three 
very capital books they are for a boy or a man. 
They are good for introduction, they are good 
for the awakening of memories. They are all by 
that man of keen mind and easy appealing style, 
Dr. W. J. Dawson. The first is the ‘Makers of 
English Poetry,’ the second is the ‘Makers of 
English Prose,’ the third is the ‘Makers of Eng- 
lish Fiction.? Dr. Dawson has read widely. But 
the important thing is that reading has been a 
part of his life. So it comes about that the glow 
of many a hearthfire, the wind off the ocean blow- 
ing over the deck of a liner in many a voyage, 
and the leaves of the trees talking together above 
the reader in some far-off camp, all bring a 
certain quality to his writing which may be all 
too absent from the book of a professional critic 
who has technical knowledge but whose reading 
has never been bathed in his life. Then Dr. 
Dawson writes with a certain graceful simplicity. 
And so his books are particularly good for just 
such chaps as this young friend of mine, even as 
they are good for men who are older and who see 


INTRODUCING THE Woruxp or Letrers 147 


between the lines the meanings which quite escape 
the scrutiny of the keen and eager lads.” 

The Lion looked out at the window. The 
garden was extraordinarily beautiful this late 
summer afternoon. 

“English literature is like that, only a great 
deal more wonderful. I wonder sometimes that 
so many people forget through what a noble line 
they have inherited a garden, a magical garden 
of perennial bloom.” | 

“The time to begin with them is when they are 
boys like your fine lad,” I suggested. 

The Lion’s face brightened. ‘You are right 
about that,” he said. ‘This lad will carry the 
torch bravely. And by and by he will hand it 
on. Already he is combining reading about 
authors and reading the authors themselves in 
just the way which is most full of promise.” 

I looked at some volumes by Professor Saints- 
bury on the table near my friend. “And all the 
while you are trying your wisdom tooth on the 
gritty style of this shrewd teacher of English.” I 
said. 

“He creates a taste for the ways of his own 
mind and the delights of his characteristic style,” 
said the Lion, “but my keen lad is not ready for 
Saintsbury yet.” 


CHAPTER XXXVI 
More Axsout GREECE 


UST as quickly as possible after my return 
from Europe I ran in to see the Lion. And 
just as I expected he tried to persuade me 

to do all the talking. But after I had replied to 
many an eager question, it was not too hard to 
insist that he in turn must submit to interroga- 
tion. 

“What are the books which the elevator has 
carried down to your subconscious mind?” I asked 
merrily. 

The Lion made a little grimace. 

“Some of them have gotten down into the 
library of the subconscious without any consent of 
mine, if they have gotten there at all,” he replied. 
“IT have read some rather poor books this 
summer.” 

He put his hand out to a little shelf beside the 
bed. 

“But I have had a good time in Greece these 
last days,” he went on. “First I read ‘The 


Pageant of Greece,’ by that industrious and cap- 
148 


Morr Axsovut GREECE 149 


able and understanding Oxford scholar, R. W. 
Livingstone. He turns the whole of Greek litera- 
ture into one great unfolding tale. Im effective 
and graphic fashion he introduces you to the 
period and the literary type and the man. Then 
he lets each speak for himself. So you have an 
anthology, a history, and some very good 
criticism.” 

He held out the book and I turned over its 
familiar pages pausing over passages which I 
too had enjoyed. But the Lion continued to 
speak. 

“Then I picked up ‘The Achievement of 
Greece,’ by Dr. William Chase Greene, of Har- 
vard University. Here you have a book with a 
touch and a method all of its own. Professor 
Greene is a good classicist. But he is also a very 
modern man. And he is every inch an American. 
All of this gives him standards for comparison 
which set the Greek life in new and happy per- 
spective. In a very fine sense his book is inter- 
pretative as well as narrative. And just because 
the seeing of one type of life in the terms of 
another is a productive and enriching experience, 
you are very glad to read after Professor Greene 
hour after hour with many an interlude for quiet 
meditation.” 

My friend was quite silent now, as if the very 


150 Tue Lion 1x His Den 


word “meditation” had carried him off to the 
serenity of some gracious experience of quiet 
thought. ‘Then he locked up smiling brightly. 

“How many Greeks do you suppose there are 
in America?” he asked, and went on without wait- 
ing for a reply, “I get letters from some of them. 
They are scattered all over the United States. 
And they love America so deeply that they want 
it to receive every gift which Attica holds out in 
friendly offermg to the young nation of the 
West.” 

After that it was of our own tense and energetic 
Republic that we talked, but once and again my 
friend used a phrase which suggested the per- 
petual youth of Athens. 


CHAPTER XXXVII 
Axsout Dr. Fospickx 


‘¢ OW tell me all about it,” said the Lion. 
“All about what,” I threw back at 
once. 

It was at the beginning of our second visit to- 
gether after my return from England in Septem- 
ber, 1924. 

“About Dr. Fosdick’s visit to England,” said 
my friend. “Of course I read about it—every- 
thing I could find—in the British Weekly and the 
Christian World. I read some of the sermons he 
preached in England in the Christian World 
Pulpit. But you’ve been over some of the very 
trails in which he traveled in the City Temple in 
London, and in Carr’s Lane in Birmingham. You 
have met various types of people in London, who 
heard him and who talked to you about him. And 
I want to know all about it.” 

I smiled a little at my friend’s impetuous eager- 
ness, and he smiled a little too as he silently 
waited. 


“Well, I suppose it would not be an exaggera- 
151 





152 Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


tion,” I began, “‘to say that no American preacher 
since Henry Ward Beecher has had such a re- 
ception in England. Dr. Fosdick is the sort of 
person the English instinctively like. They feel 
at once the finely. disciplined quality of his mind. 
They are delighted with the sense he gives—quite 
without ostentation—of wide ranging and an 
understanding perusal of multitudes of books. 
They feel the intellectual honesty, the hard and 
patient investigation, the serious thought which 
lie back of his utterances. They are carried 
along by the sheer momentum of his eloquence, 
just because they feel that it is not a substitute 
for thought and effort but the expression of a 
mental preparation which has required not hours 
but years. They happily respond to his brilliant 
flashes of expression because they feel how sound 
is the intellectual life back of them. And deeper 
than anything else they feel that he is the eager 
prophet of a religious life which is commanding 
and authentic to him, which has captured his 
mind, mastered his conscience, and which is in 
command of his life. On all sides, from the most 
various types of people one hears the heartiest 
and happiest expressions of appreciation for his 
visit and for what it brought to England.” 

“Ts there any friendly criticism?” 

“You have to have a very powerful microscope 





Azsout Dr. Fospicx 153 


—if one may use that figure—to detect even a 
suggestion of it. Perhaps once in a while there 
is the tiniest hint heard that in time Dr. Fosdick’s 
erudition, which now has the splendor and grace 
of growth, will add a quality of ripeness. And 
perhaps there is the barest suggestion once and 
a while that his clear and earnest mind will yet 
probe to depths of thinking into which it has not 
yet moved. But if there are any suggestions at 
all of this sort they are all accompanied by words 
of warm and gracious friendliness.” 

The Lion gave a little movement which made 
me know that he was ready to talk. 

“T will never forget the impression which ‘The 
Manhood of the Master’ made upon me. Then 
‘The Meaning of Prayer’ filled me with a kind of 
joyous eagerness. “The Meaning of Faith’ and 
‘The Meaning of Service’ seemed to be just about 
as good pieces of work after their kind as one could 
come upon. I had not dared, until Dr. Fosdick 
emerged, to believe that the shrewd, practical 
Young Men’s Christian Association clientele was 
ready for that sort of thing. Few people realize 
how he has led that group into a sort of intel- 
lectual and cultural promised land. I was happy 
as I read ‘The Twelve Tests of Character.’ I 
liked best of all the Cole Lectures ‘Progress and 


154 Tur Lion 1x His Den 


Religion.” Now I am going to get into the Yale 
Lectures on preaching. I’m glad he had such a 
fine time in England. When we sent him over 
we gave something of the best we have.” 


CHAPTER XXXVIIT 


Axpout THE New PsycHo.tocy 


out the Lion as I entered his room. 
“At last,” I replied gaily, “I knew you 
would be talking to me about the new psychology. 
Wait until I get a comfortable chair.” 

“Well I do not want exactly to talk to you 
about the new psychology. I do not at the mo- 
ment want to talk about Freud. I do not want 
to talk about Jung. I want to begin with a new 
little book quite a by-product of the whole move- 
ment, “he New Psychology and the Preacher,’ 
by Dr. H. Crichton Miller. Then I want to tell 
you some thoughts of a quiet man who has a great 
deal of time'to analyze his own processes.” 

“To begin then with Dr. H. Crichton Miller,” I 
threw at my friend, crossing my legs and settling 
down into an attitude of attention. 

‘Dr. H. Crichton Miller,” said the Lion, “‘tells 
different sorts of people such as parents and 
teachers what they ought to get out of the new 


psychology. Now he is doing this for the 
155 


ss ' LL aboard for the subconscious!” called 


156 Tuer Lion 1n His Dow 


preachers. He is not without modesty. He has 
no liking for the psychological mire. He is 
keenly interested in the great moral and spiritual 
sanctions. And he knows a great deal about the 
literature of the new psychology and rather more 
about actual men and women. So he writes a book 
which contains much that is wholesome and sane 
and wise. When he comes to deal with dreams he 
plunges into the sort of allegory out of which 
Biblical interpreters emerged long ago. And 
some of his psychological interpretations of litera- 
ture fill one with a sort of sad alarm. Then once 
and again he fails to emerge completely from 
some of the abysses of moral gloom where some of 
the Freudians dwell. He lacks the larger per- 
spective which a little sympathetic knowledge of 
the deeper aspects of the history of philosophy 
and even the history of theology would give him.” 

The Lion had evidently done with H. Crich- 
ton Miller for the moment. 

‘And now for the thoughts of the quiet man,” 
I suggested. 

My friend smiled. 

‘Well, of course, lying here one does think a 
good deal. Ill only give you two of my dis- 
coveries now for what they are worth. One is 
that if I send one sort of thing down into my 
subconscious life, I may expect just that sort of 


Apout THE New Psycuoitocy 157 


thing to come back. And after all I have a good 
deal to do with what goes down.” 

“But what about the racial deposit in the sub- 
conscious with which you have nothing to do ex- 
cept to face its results?” I asked. 

“That’s the other thing I want to speak about. 
At least it’s on the way to the other thing. I 
distinguish three levels of the subconscious. One 
contains that which I send down. The next con- 
tains that which racial experience has left behind. 
And beneath that is the clear pure stream of the 
life of God which flows through every human life. 
If one breaks through the wall to that mighty 
stream it rushes in, cleansing and inspiring. It 
is stronger than all the racial inheritance just as 
eternity is stronger than time. One can allow 
that stream to flow through without utilizing its 
power, or one can open the way for its movement 
through every crevice of the conscious and un- 
conscious life. The thing that I have learned is 
that the deepest element in the subconscious is 
the presence of God.” 


CHAPTER XXXIX 


Tue Quest ror Uniry AND PROGRESS 


the famous ‘Unity Series’ when you were 
in London,” observed the Lion. ‘Now tell 
me what he is like.” 

“He is a man you might well pause to look at 
the second time even if you did not know his 
name,” I replied. “He carries himself with a 
certain air of quiet distinction. He has shrewd 
and kindly and whimsical eyes, with a touch of 
half-ironic mirth in them. He listens m a con- 
versation with an air of interest combined with 
a touch of detachment, as if he is considering the 
thoughts which are being propounded in the light 
of large and varied relationships. He has nothing 
of hard aggressiveness about him but there is a 
quiet assurance which has its own steady com- 
pulsion. He carries his erudition easily but 
firmly. You like him and you carry a pleasant 
sense of his personality back to the reading of his 
books.” 

My friend was ready with his response to the 


words of characterization. 
158 


<i S" you met Mr. F. S. Marvin, the editor of 


Tue Quest ror Uniry anp Procress 159 


“IT have been following Mr. Marvin for ten 
years,” he said. “I began with his own book 
‘The Living Past’—that notable piece of 
synthetic thinking about the whole of human his- 
tory, so much slighter in form and so much pro- 
founder in erudition than Mr. H. G. Wells’s ‘Out- 
line of History.’ His conception of the past pour- 
ing its fertilizing currents forever into the present 
quite captured my mind. Then I read ‘The 
Century of Hope’—that brilliant and effective 
study of the nineteenth century. These two 
books ripe with years of reading and research and 
brooding meditation gave Mr. Marvin a place all 
his own in my mind. Then I began with the 
‘Unity Series.2 Their method arrested my in- 
terest at once. ‘The gathering together of a 
group of men who had a right to speak, the unit- 
ing of their individual contribution by means of 
unifying essays, written by Mr. Marvin himself, 
into volumes dealing with notable comprehensive- 
ness with themes of far-reaching significance, 
represented an experiment and an achievement 
which filled me with a sort of glad surprise. I re- 
member that you once referred to these volumes 
as a little university. I had scarcely dreamed 
that such a body of significant generalization 
based upon close and careful study; could! be 
gathered together in so brief a compass. So “The 


160 Tue Lion 1x His Den 


Unity of Modern Civilization,’ ‘Progress and His- 
tory,’ “The Evolution of World Peace,’ ‘Recent 
Developments of European Thought,’ and the 
others had each an instant welcome upon its 
arrival.” | 

The Lion moved the fingers of his right hand 
through his hair in a quiet meditative way he had. 

Then he added one more word. 

“If we could get all our college graduates to 
read and reread these volumes which Mr. Marvin 
has written and edited, what a difference it would 
make in America’s contribution to civilization.” 

“A good many forward-looking men are read- 
ing them,” I reminded the Lion, before we turned 
to other themes. 


CHAPTER XL 
Tue LEApERSHIP OF Dr. CapMAN 


“°F. WE has a place all of his own in the Ameri- 
H can pulpit,” declared the Lion. 
He was speaking of Dr. 8S. Parkes — 
Cadman, the famous pastor of the Central Con- 
gregational Church in Brooklyn, New York. 
“No one is surprised to learn that he is an 
Englishman by birth and training. The Wesleyan 
church put its fire into his heart and the stamp 
of its scholarship upon his brain. He heard Dale 
in the great days of that imperial preacher. He 
read Burke until the majestic flow of his mighty 
periods became a part of the music of his own 
mind. When he came to America, his hearty and 
masterful personality quickly made a place for it- 
self. He was one of the outstanding preachers of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church, when he accepted 
a call to the great Congregational pulpit. Here 
for twenty-three years he has made a pulpit a 
throne. His own powerful figure, with his appeal- 
ing voice, his massive and vigorous style, the 


range and heartiness of his interests, and his deep 
161 


162 Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


sense of the realities of religion unite as elements 
in his power. He is so splendidly alive. He is so 
heartily human. And he has so characteristically 
the assurance of the mind which has found a secure 
dwelling place, that men in an anemic and transi- 
tional age find him:a source of infinite refreshment 
and stimulus and inspiration.” 

My friend paused reminiscently. “I remember 
how happily I read ‘Charles Darwin and Other 
English Thinkers.” Such books and such utter- 
ances ought not to be forgotten when we think of 
the influences which made a home for truth-seeking 
young men where science and religion could hap- 
pily meet. ‘Then his book on those three men of 
Oxford, Wyclif, Wesley, and Newman, was the 
sort of work which brings back the past and helps 
to create the right mood for the future. Wesley 
has rarely been described on a larger canvas. It 
was inevitable that such a mind should set about 
interpreting the tasks of the preacher. And so 
we were all ready for that fat and fertilizing 
book, ‘The Ambassadors of God.’ ” 

“A man like Dr. Cadman cannot forget that 
every realm belongs to the sway of the sanctions 
of religion. And soI was ready for the announce- 
ment of his book, ‘Christianity and the State.’ ” 

The Lion looked up brightly. 
“What big challenging books on great and 


Tuer Lrapersute oF Dr. Capman 163 


stirring themes Dr. Cadman writes. They seem— 
indeed they are—the actual reflection of the eager 
and manifold and discriminating life of the man. 
I like to think of him going about America. I 
like to think of the thousands who listen to him 
over the radio. He has a downright mind. He 
walks with a firm step. And he dares to write 
in a style which calls for a mind of certain ample 
qualities, of some actual leisure, and of capacity 
for meditation about great themes.” 

“What will he write about next?” I asked. 

“Who can say?” replied the Lion. ‘He watches 
and looks and listens and thinks and analyzes all 
the while. Whatever the subject it will come 
deeply out of the life of the time. It will be en- 
riched by noble memories of other days. It will 
have an outlook on the future. And it will have 
a window open toward Jerusalem.” 


CHAPTER XLI 
Tue CHRISTIAN SPIRIT IN THE CHURCHES 


ch S to the churches,” said the Lion, “I think 
A I know the next step.” 
We had been talking about the United 
Church of Canada, and of the altogether extraor- 
dinary Christian statesmanship shown by men like 
Dr. Chown in the negotiations which have led up 
to the present consummation. 

“The world is moving in that direction,” said 
the Lion, “but it is not ready for it yet. There 
are preliminary steps which must be taken.” 

‘Well, we seem to be taking some of them,” I 
replied. ‘Federation may not be everything. 
But it is a good deal better than nothing. And 
it is a great deal better than hostility. When you 
get the denominational leaders of great cities 
working together about great social and civic 
enterprises, something very far-reaching and — 
something very significant is being done. You 
cannot tell how much may come out of it.” 

*‘And it is easy to wait for the wonderful things 
to emerge and in the meantime to neglect some very 
practical and very promising possibilities.” 

164 


33 


Tue CuRIsTIAN SPIRIT IN THE CHuRcHES 165 


“Meaning just what by that rather vague and 
tantalizing phrase?” I asked. 

“Meaning that an adventure in psychological 
sympathy will do more than anything else to 
change and ennoble the whole situation.” 

“That is adding insult to injury,” I replied. 
“What do you mean by an adventure in psycho- 
logical sympathy?” 

“Tt is rather a mouthful,” admitted the Lion. 
“Let me explain.” 

“Pray illuminate my dark mind,” I requested. 

“Remember I’m quite serious,” continued the 
Lion. Then he went on: 

“When a man in one of the great Christian 
denominations begins to think of the intellectual 
sanctions or the ecclesiastical practice of another 
he at once takes the position of a logician analyz- 
ing the contents of the other view. And at once 
a certain hard and brittle quality comes into his 
mind. He takes a huge mental delight in finding 
just what the weaknesses of other positions are. 
In the meantime men in the other church are 
doing just the same thing with his faith and 
practice. And so the set of the dialectical sun 
finds them just about as far apart as possible. 
Our logical battles separate us. ‘They do not 
draw us together.” 

“Well,” I replied a little nettled, “what can we 


166 Tue Lion in His Den 





do about it. Shall we seek for the day when 
everybody agrees about everything because no- 
body cares particularly about anything?” 

“Not so fast, my friend,” said the Lion. And 
before going on with his argument he quoted 
Emerson with delighted malice ““Why so hot little 
man.” 

“So far I insist that your argument has left 
me quite cold,” I retorted. “But I await the next 
stage of the argument.” 

“Tt all comes to this,” said the Lion. ‘*When- 
ever a man of one church is thinking of a man in 
another, and, instead of asking what he believes, 
asks why he believes it, at once everything is 
changed. When in respect of forms and ritual 
he asks not what a man does but why he does it, 
a new path opens at once. Take an illustration 
or two. Here is a man with a tremendous tradi- 
tion of independence and of emphasis on the indi- 
vidual. He is thinking of a church whose funda- 
mental note is solidarity. If he does it as a logi- 
cian, he thinks at once of tyranny and of mechani- 
cal processes. Butif he begins to study that deep 
human hunger for union and organic life which 
lies back of all the churches of solidarity, he be- 
gins to feel a curious sympathy for it all. He has 
sometimes felt terribly alone. He can in a meas- 
ure see what a great spiritual organism could do 


Tue CHRISTIAN SPIRIT IN THE CHURCHES 167 


for all its members. An independent may turn 
from a high churchman with his head. But every 
independent has a high churchman hidden some- 
where in his heart. On the other hand take the 
member of a church of solidarity. He begins to 
think of the independent tradition. And if he 
does it as a logician he is thinking of anarchy, 
and disruption and all that disintegrates the noble 
beauty of his composite life. But suppose he 
begins to think of that deep human instinct which ~ 
is expressed by all those sanctions having to do 
with the inviolable integrity of the individual life. 
He begins to feel a thrill of sympathy. He, too, 
has a priceless personal life. He has felt op- 
pressed sometimes by a power which did not con- 
sider the sacredness of that life. A high church- 
man may turn from an independent with his head. 
But every high churchman has an independent 
hidden away in his heart. And so I believe that 
perpetual adventures in psychological sympathy 
would bring us nearer and nearer together. Fin- 
ally they would result in the creation of a Church 
great enough to make room for the truth in all 
our positions. Never forget the true saying that 
we are usually right in our affirmations and wrong 
in our denials. Such a mood would create a new 
atmosphere of affirmation. That would be a great 
gain. And it would create an atmosphere of 


168 Tue Lion 1n His Den 


good will which would move through all the 
churches. And that would be a gain which would 
surely express the mind of the Master of the 
Church.” 


CHAPTER XLII 


Tuer Messacrts oF THE CHURCHES FOR THE 
CHURCHES 


66 


HAVE been thinking of your experiment — 
in psychological sympathy among the 
churches,” I observed. I was sitting beside 
the Lion and the peace of the lovely summer even- 
ing seemed reflected in his face. There was a 
flash in his eye, however, which suggested vital 
energy as well as serenity, and I fancied that he 
was ready to talk. “You illustrated your prin- 
ciple by a reference to the groups emphasizing 
solidarity and the groups representing the em- 
phasis upon the rights and liberties of the indi- 
vidual. Would you be willing to carry your 
illustrations a little farther?” I suggested. 
“Well, take a very characteristic and obvious 
line of demarkation,” replied the Lion. ‘There 
are the groups to whom Christianity is essentially 
an appropriation of a fundamental set of intel- 
lectual concepts regarding God and man. There 
are the groups to whom religion is essentially a 


rich and transforming and gloriously emotional 
169 





170 Tuer Lion in His DEn 





expression of the inner life. When they begin 
to reason about each other how hard and rigid 
they become. The dialecticians see before them 
the ghosts of all che overwrought and hectic en- 
thusiasms which have appeared in the history of 
religion. They are not reassured by the picture. 
They see how easily religious emotion turns to 
sensuous or even sensual emotion and this rouses 
their profound suspicion. 'They see how easily 
mysticism can turn into pantheism and how easily 
pantheism comes to mean the disintegration of 
ethics, and so they turn from the emotional types 
of religion with profound hostility. On the other 
hand the mystics see all the hard unloveliness of 
a merely dialectical religion. If they are logical in 
nothing else then, they are keenly logical in their 
attacks upon logical orthodoxy as a substitute for 
the vitalities of heart-warming religion. 'They 
show how intellectualism degenerates into scholas- 
ticism and how easily scholasticism busies itself 
about the endless discussion of the unimportant 
and neglects the mightier matters of law and life. 
They do not let us forget the debates over hypo- 
thetical angels poised on the point of a hypothe- 
tical needle. They remind us that there is all the 
difference in the world between a formula and the 
reality for which it stands. And they point out 
the curious and perpetual tendency for the dialec- 


Tuer Messacres ror THE CHurcHES 171 


tician to become loyal to his formula to the neglect 
of the reality it expresses. They point out the 
cold intellectual pride which often settles upon 
the intellectualist. They picture the barren 
quality of those churches where the rattle of syl- 
logisms takes the place of the pouring forth of 
glowing inspirations. So they turn from the way 
of the logical theologian with lofty scorn.” 

“Very well,” I cried, “now how are you going 
to get them together?” 

“Just by a simple change of attitude,” replied 
the Lion. ‘The moment the logician stops ana- 
lyzing the weaknesses of the mystic and begins to 
ask what deep need in human nature mysticism 
satisfies, everything is seen in a new light. After 
all the logician has a heart and when once he 
begins to think of it he sees that even a syllogism 
is never fully potent until it is set on fire. When 
logic is wedded to moral and spiritual passion it 
shakes the world. And so the logician finds a 
mystic hidden away in his heart. Witness Jona- 
than Edwards. On the other hand the man of 
the inner life has a new door opened before him 
when he asks why men try to give logical form 
to the religious life. He is forced to confess that 
religious experience has a way of turning into 
vapor and mist and that this simply does not | 
happen if the rapture of the mystic is based on 


172 Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


the logic of the dialectician. Not even mysticism 
can get along very well as a nervous system with- 
out any bones. So the two types of men each 
come to see that the other is making a real contri- 
bution, each that there is need of the other, and 
at last that only together they can do the thing 
which needs to be done for the world.” 


CHAPTER XLII 


Mr. J. Str. Lor Srracuey’s Minp at Pray 


sé (): course it’s not a book for everybody,” 


mused the Lion. 

He was holding in his hand “The River 
of Life”—that recently published diary of Mr. 
J. St. Loe Strachey, the able editor of the Spec- 
tator. 

“T read Mr. Strachey’s autobiography, “The 
Adventure of Living,’ with the greatest interest,” 
went on my friend. “Here was the tale of the 
life of a typical English gentleman of letters— 
typical in the combination of high breeding and 
the love of knowledge and the joy of letters— 
very individual in personal tang and quality—and 
altogether fascinating as the tale of a curious 
and earnest mind moving about in high adventure 
among the thoughts and activities of men. Now 
comes this diary, ‘The River of Life.” It was 
pretty much written during the years 1923 and 
1924 and it moves with easy and happy decisive- 
ness among all sorts of themes. Now it is the 


mountain country of Wales. Now it is the new 
173 


174 Tuer Lion in His DEN 


psychology. Now it is the glory of Italian 
scenery with subtle interpretation of Italian life. 
Now it is comment and criticism ranging from 
Aristotle through Racine to Matthew Arnold. 
Now it is the collection of bon mots or des- 
perate sayings or even limericks. Now it is 
the consideration of bafflimg problems, freedom 
and solidarity, God and man. Now it is the 
flare of a bit of Mr. Strachey’s own verse. 
Now it is a thrust of Swift or a bit of polite irony 
quoted from Pope. Altogether the book shows a 
gifted and highly trained mind at play. There 
is something more than play—for the river of 
this eager and investigating mind reflects no end 
of matters of real significance. Very often you 
see the stars in the sky above. And sometimes 
you hear the mighty motion of that great sea to- 
ward which all rivers run. You must bring some- 
thing to such a book. It is not for a man whose 
mind has no past. But for the man who brings 
a mind with some riches of its own there is high 
and noble merchandise and much gladness amid 
the handling of the wares.” 

The Lion seemed inclined to play a little with 
his idea of merchants of the mind. 

He resisted the temptation however and con- 
tinued to talk of the editor of the Spectator. 

“He has a real style,” declared my friend. “It 





Me. J. St. Loz Stracuey’s Minn at Pray 175 


has a certain urbane and easy dignity. Even the 
fun is edged with highly bred and gracious speech. 
There is the serene and steady motion of a mind 
which is not conscious of its aristocratic caste 
but quite without analysis takes it for granted. 
There is many a phrase alive with insight and 
many a sentence with light burning at its heart. 
There are figures of curious felicity as when de- 
scribing the patient and painstaking mountain- 
climbing of some modern scientist Mr. Strachey 
at last brings him to the top of the range, only to 
discover that some keen-minded Greek has shot an 
arrow to the very summit a couple of thousand 
years ago. The people of taste and understanding 
will find this book and they will give it a distin- 
guished welcome.” 

The Lion waited a moment. ‘Then he looked 
at me whimsically. “What a good game the 
mental life is!” he said. ‘Why do so few people 
play it?” Before I had time to answer he threw 
at me one of his sententious utterances which put 
a period at the end of this particular conversa- 
tion: 

“When intelligence ceases to be a task and 
becomes a game a civilization enters upon a new 
era,” 


CHAPTER XLIV 
AN eine, Critica Minp 


of HERE ought to be more of this sort of 
thing,” declared the Lion. 
“Meaning by this sort of thing—” 
I asked. 

My friend held toward me that arresting book, 
“Living Issues in Religious Thought,” by Her- 
bert G. Wood, professor of New Testament Liter- 
ature and Church History at the Selly Oak Col- 
lege, and Director of Studies at Woodbrooke. 

“From George Fox to Bertrand Russell,” I 
said aloud reading the subtitle of the volume. 
But the Lion had started on what promised to be 
a vigorous conversational trot, and I hurried after 
to be sure that I missed nothing. 

“Tt’s this way,” my friend was saying. ““There’s 
no end of agreement and disagreement in the con- 
temporary world. But there is very little real 
criticism. ‘The publishing of a volume of acute 
and understanding criticism is a real event. And 
when the critic knows how to use the English 
language with vigor and energy and pith in his 

176 


An Acutrety Criticat Minp Led. 


writing, and when he writes within the area of 
vital Christian thought and experience, then he 
brings me a gift for which I cannot be too grate- 
ful. 

My friend had reached for the volume and was 
holding it again in his hands. ‘Take the Essays 
devoted to the analysis of the position of Mr. 
Bertrand Russell for instance. Here Professor 
Wood is dealing with one of the most subtle and 
adroitly sophisticated minds of the century. And 
with a quiet skill which one watches with a kind of 
amazed joy he takes up the writing of Mr. Rus- 
sell and entangles him in a web of contradictory 
statements which only the shrewd psychology, the 
glamor of style, and the air of cunning logic 
which characterize the writing of Russell have 
hidden from view. Here is dialectic of a fascinat- 
ing and brilliant sort. But back of it all you 
find something very much finer and better than 
the thrust of the sword of a master of logic. All 
the while you are kept in the reaim of great moral 
and spiritual sanctions. And after the sword 
play you stand in the presence of those high and 
mastering experiences which give life its noblest 
meaning. ‘The discussion of the next revival of 
religion is more than a piece of clear thinking. It 
adds to diagnosis a noble prophetic power.” 

- “Logic and mysticism come in for a noble wed- 


178 Tue Lion 1n His Den 


lock when you actually join them together,” I 
ventured. 

“Precisely,” said the Lion, but he went on not 
to be diverted. “Take the study of the methods 
of Professor Kirsopp Lake in the essay ‘Liberal 
Protestantism and Modern Criticism.’ Nothing 
could be keener or more sound. And the studies 
of H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw have the sort 
of discrimination which gives one a renewed sense 
of what criticism can be in our own time. The 
study of Quakerism and the appreciation of John 
Woolman have meaning for any man of good 
will anywhere in the world.” 

The Lion had a very eager light m his eye 
as he spoke. 

“Just to have younger men alive who do this 
sort of thing gives me a new confidence in the 
future. When the critic rises to creative enthu- 
slasm you are ready to pass from the age of 
analysis to the age of achievement.” 


CHAPTER XLV 


Pavt TurovucH ConTEMPORARY Evers 


of HAT do you know about the apostle 

WV Paul?” asked the Lion. 

“Perhaps a little less than I knew 
twenty-six years ago when I graduated from theo- 
logical seminary,” I replied, “in spite of and 
partly because of all the books about Paul which 
I have read since that time.” 

The Lion laughed. 

“IT know what you mean,” he said. “Of course 
criticism does decrease the area of knowledge— 
or of what had been supposed to be knowledge 
—on the one hand even as it increases it on the 
other. Still I should fancy the Pauline material 
represents a genuine advance.” 

‘We do know more about Paul’s environment 
and about the world in which he lived,” I replied, 
“T should be inclined to say that we know more 
of the incidental Paul. I am not sure that we 
know more of the essential Paul.” 

“Ah, but to know the essential Paul you must 


have a Pauline experience,” said the Lion, “And 
179 


180 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 


I am ready to grant that this age is not particu- 
larly Pauline. Still Harold Dodd’s book seems to 
me to say essential things with understanding as 
well as unessential things with great skill.” 

There was a twinkle in the Lion’s eye as he 
saw my smile. But he pursued his way serenely. 

“JT have been reading Dr. Charles Jefferson’s 
book, ‘The Character of Paul,’ ” he said. “You 
might call it a study of the untheological Paul, or 
a study of Paul with the theology left out.” 

“Am I to gather that you find Paul emanci- 
pated from dogma or emasculated because with- 
out dogma?” I asked. 

“Neither,” replied my friend. “Theology is 
not contradicted, any more than you contradict 
the day when you describe a beautiful night. 
Theology is passed by. It is not antagonized. 
Dr. Jefferson’s book is a study of the human be- 
ing called Paul. You really do feel that Dr. Jef- 
ferson knows him intimately. And he makes you 
know him intimately too. You come in touch 
with a warm and living personality and you 
find your own life kindled and enriched as you 
spend bright hours with him. Dr. Jefferson all 
the while acting as interpreter.” 

“Where do you place Dr. Jefferson theologi- 
cally?” I asked. 

“I do not think of him as belonging to a school 


Paut THrovucu ConTeMporARY Eyrts 181 


or as adopting any of the passwords,” replied 
the Lion. “It is not that he is aloof. It is that 
he is different. He has his own approach. He 
takes his own line. And somehow the usual cleav- 
ages do not seem to find a place as you follow the 
trails of his mind. In this book, for instance, 
he ignores or pushes aside a hundred critical prob- 
lems. They simply do not interest him. He knows 
about them. He has read the books dealing with 
them. But they have no fundamental seizure of 
his mind. He feels that in the Pauline documents 
and the book of Acts he has come to know a per- 
sonality. He must portray that personality. 
And he resolutely refuses to let a discussion of 
the pigments interfere with the painting of the 
portrait. I will not say that this satisfies every 
mood or every person. I will say that in this con- 
fused age it is a very fine thing to have at the 
heart of New York a mind so sane, so clear, so 
shrewdly wise. There is at times an almost 
homely honesty about the processes of Dr. Jeffer- 
son’s thought. But he gives you a sense of 
solidity and integrity. And he makes religion a 
very practical and a very definite thing.” _ 

“There are after all a good many people who 
are only willing to get acquainted with Paul 
when he is not wearing his theological garments,” 
I admitted. 


182 Tue Lion 1x His Den 


“And Dr. Jefferson’s book precisely meets their 
requirements,” said the Lion. 

“It is a little as if James had written a book 
about Paul,’’ I ventured. 

“Now don’t go mixing your apostles,” said the 
Lion. “It is enough to know that Dr. Jefferson 
belongs to a true apostolic succession.” 


CHAPTER XLVI 
A GREAT ORGAN oF CRITICISM 


a HEN I want to read the most distin- 
guished organ devoted to literary criti- 
cism published in the English speaking 

world—” began the Lion, oracularly. 

“You read the Literary Supplement of the 
London Times,” I interrupted. 

“What remarkable discernment you show,” de- 
clared the Lion a little glint of satire in his voice, 
“especially when there was no other possible way 
to finish the sentence.” 

My friend pulled a copy of the Literary Sup- 
plement from under his pillow. He gazed upon 
it affectionately. 

“T’ve just been rereading the leading article 
published the week after Joseph Conrad died,” 
he said. ‘There is a piece of work done with 
dignity, with acumen, with complete command of 
the materials, and with just the gift for the word 
of high efficiency and the phrase of athletic fit- 
ness, which altogether make up an article of ade- 
quacy and stability and power. That article will 


make good reading fifty years from now.” 
183 


184 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 


The Lion mused quietly for a little while. 

“T like to think of Mr. Bruce Richmond,” he 
continued. ‘He has been the editor of the Liter- 
ary Supplement ever since its first number was 
issued over twenty-three years ago. He has 
wrought into actual achievement a very high and 
a very testing ideal. When a man sets out to 
have every significant book reviewed by the one 
man in the world who knows as much or more 
about the subject than the man who wrote the 
book he is setting a standard for himself which 
seems like a tempting of all the scornful and 
ironic gods. Mr. Richmond has aimed as high as 
that, and what an astonishing accomplishment 
has been the result!” 

“What do you think of his policy of anony- 
mous articles all through the paper?” I asked. 

“It’s a stroke of genius,” replied the Lion, “for 
it has made possible what has come to be a definite 
achievement. The Literary Supplement is not an 
organ of personal opinion. It is an institution 
with a sort of mighty and commanding personality 
of its own. It takes possession of a young man 
who knows his materials but lacks confidence. It 
lifts him to the level of its own high authority. 
And he writes as he never wrote before. It takes 
the man of assured position and wide reputation 
and makes him for once forget the name which 


A Great OrGAN oF CRITICISM 185 


usually appears at the end of his articles. He 
writes with a freedom from self-consciousness and 
from the eccentric elements of his own genius. 
The great organ at once frees him in one fashion 
and stabilizes his mind in another. I once heard 
a keen critic say, ‘I have known many men who 
wrote better anonymously than under their own 
signatures. I have known none who when the 
experiment was tried wrote better under his own 
name than anonymously.’ ” 

The Lion mused a moment. Then he said, 
‘And think of the austere and noble standards of 
workmanship and of taste which the Times Sup- 
plement has maintained. One rather envies the 
man who has created a literary polar star.” 

My friends eyes were gleaming as he added one 
other word. 

“JT think sometimes that I would like to have 
Mr. Bruce Richmond’s mind. Think of watching 
the whole procession of literary production in the 
English-speaking world and far beyond from his 
point of vantage for a quarter of a century. 
Some day we will all realize how much we owe to 
him.” 


CHAPTER XLVII 
A Boox or Far-Reacuine SIGNIFICANCE 


‘HAT do you consider the best reasoned 
w/ setting forth of the Christian religion 
for the modern man?” asked the Lion. 

I fenced a bit in my reply. 

“When you put a question like that I always 
know that you have an answer hidden somewhere 
about your person. So let us have the answer.” 

The Lion for once fell into my little trap. 
“That is really what I want to talk about,” he 
said. “I have just finished reading ‘Liberal 
Evangelicalism.’ It is called ‘an interpretation’ 
and it is written by members of the Church of 
England. One finds among the contributors such 
names as that of Dr. E. A. Burroughs, the Dean 
of Bristol; and Dr. E. W. Barnes, the new Bishop 
of Birmingham. When Dean Inge had read this 
book he wrote: ‘These Essays will be a landmark 
in the history of the Church of England.? And 
when I had finished the series I was ready to say 
that it might well be a landmark in the history 


of the Modern Church.”’ 
186 





A Boox or Far-Reacuine SIGNIFICANCE: 187 


My friend turned over the pages for a little. 
Then he spoke again. 

“These fourteen essays with a dozen different 
authors are singularly coherent and the unity of 
the whole piece of work is extraordinary. It is 
not a hard and artificial thing. It is a living and 
happy harmony of fraternal spirits viewing a 
great subject with the sympathy of a common 
experience and a common idea. The first thing 
which pleases you is the candor and intellectual 
honesty of these essays. ‘They lift the most baff- 
ling and puzzling of problems. ‘They discuss 
questions which have aroused a fierce heat of pas- 
sion and prejudice. And all the while they let 
fall upon them the clear light of reason and the 
cool steadiness of an unprejudiced mind. The 
way in which all sorts of superstition, ecclesiastical 
and secular, is pushed aside, is a very happy thing. 
You feel that you are out in the open air under 
the clear sky, and that the searching sunlight 
shines everywhere. The man who is afraid of 
intellectual dishonesty and has an instinctive fear 
of processes of reasoning conducted in the witch- 
ery of an emotional moonlight with many an elu- 
sive shadow, will delight in this book. But the 
second thing about it is a greater thing. It is 
fundamentally religious. In the best sense of the 
word it is a book about God. It is.a book about 


188 Tue Lion 1x His Den 





God as He speaks to the world in the person and 
work and spirit of Jesus Christ. The theological 
essays are all first of all essays alive with religious 
experience clothed in the very speech of the 
thoughtful modern man. You do not feel that 
you are being offered magical watchwords. You 
feel that you are in the presence of luminous 
minds and warm hearts kindled by the glory of 
the presence of the friendly God. There is an 
ethical passion which rouses your conscience. 
There is a spiritual fervor which kindles the intel- 
lect as well as the heart. You feel that religion is 
an experience of the growing mind to the writers 
of these essays, and that the Holy Spirit is the 
companion of intellectual search as well as of 
moral struggle. You have here a great evangeli- 
cal tradition stated with the freedom of living and 
growing minds who claim every achievement of 
science and all the results of capable criticism and 
philosophy as a part of an imperial and eager 
religion going forth to conquer the world. You 
are taught to think of God’s spirit as the Lord of 
evolution. You are made at home in the world 
of the most critical Biblical scholarship. Religion 
and science meet in a glad and eager fellowship. 
And all this is not merely a matter of general 
principles. The most concrete and baffling per- 
plexities are discussed, problems in society and 


A Boox or Far-Reacuine SIegnrFICANCcE 189 


church and state are lifted, and everything is 
seen in the terms of a kind of glowing scientific 
mysticism.” 

Once again the Lion was silent. Then he spoke 
one more word before he turned to other themes: 

“T want to know how many denominations con- 
tain such groups as that from which this volume 
comes. Does America have such groups. And if 
it does, why are they inarticulate?” 


CHAPTER XLVIII 


A Virau PERSONALITY 


America—” began the Lion. 

I waited with amused interest—interest 
because of the subject, amusement because my 
friend paused in the middle of his sentence, and 
did not go on. 

*“‘At the moment you seem in the process of be- 
ing silent about the notable preachers in 
America,” I said at length. 

“I was gathering vagrant thoughts and collect- 
ing evasive impressions,” replied my friend. Then 
he continued. 

“The other night I heard Professor Theodore 
Soares, of the University of Chicago, over the 
radio—which almost makes me feel a citizen of 
the world again. Of course I knew something of 
Dr. Soares. I understood his place of leadership 
in religious education, and possessed at least some 
comprehension of that for which he stood as presi- 
dent of the American Association. But I was not 


quite prepared for the full impact of his person- 
190 


vf S. EAKING of notable preachers in 


A Virrat PERSONALITY 191 


ality as I received it over the radio. I almost felt 
the flame of his personality like a fire burning 
near my cheek. The sheer intellectual resiliency 
swept me out of myself. The sentences with their 
clarity, their sure thrust, and the dynamic energy 
of the delivery, gave me a curious sense of con- 
tentment. And the preacher’s passion coursing 
through everything else like a great tidal move- 
ment irresistibly sweeping forward under all the 
bright, white passion of the words, spoke to some- 
thing very deep in me—something not too often 
touched and roused. I felt at once a combination 
of intellectual sophistication, keen scholarship, 
and sincere spiritual passion. It is a happy day 
when that sort of thing comes right into one’s 
home. I think I should have to put him in my 
list of America’s best preachers among the group 
who are just now coming to fullness of power.” 
The Lion waited a little. Then he went on. 
“Of course Charles Gilkey would be one of them. 
There is a sort of penetrating simplicity about his 
utterance. Perhaps part of it is his voice. Part 
of it is his style. But most of it is his mind. He 
knows his materials. He holds an assured citizen- 
ship in the world of culture and of Biblical scho- 
larship. Harvard, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Mar- 
burg have left their mark upon him. But he has 
not been cast in his universities. And he has kept 


192 Tue Lion 1n His Den 


near to the eager and enquiring minds of quanti- 
ties of young people. You have a feeling that he 
knows a great deal about the footprints left by 
the contemporary mind in the trails of life. But 
back of everything else, there is a figure—ancient 
but eternally contemporary—from whom he never 
moves far away.” 

The afternoon was wearing away and I remem- 
bered an engagement. 

“But I was going to talk about Charles Jeffer- 
son and Henry Sloan Coffin, Parkes Cadman, 
Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Joseph Fort Newton 
and Albert Parker Fitch, and Ernest Freemont 
Tittle and Ralph Sockman and—” 

“And altogether the contemporary American 
pulpit is very wide,” I smiled back at him as I 
passed through the door. 


CHAPTER XLIX 
CoNSCIENCE AND TASTE 


R. G. F. BARBOUR’S “Life of Alex- 
ander Whyte” was particularly visible 
as I came into the Lion’s room and 

walked beside his bed. 

“Ts your head behind that fat volume,” I en- 
quired, and without waiting for a reply continued: 
“You seem to have set sail in a book for parts 
unknown and all I can see is the fluttering of the 
sails.” 

“Don’t mix your metaphors,” objected the Lion. 
Then as he put the book down there was the 
sound of something very like a sigh. 

“T just finished it before you came in and I was 
rereading certain pages.” 

He looked at me steadily for a moment, his eyes 
deep and luminous. 

“Do men often do that sort of thing?” he asked. 

“Meaning do they often write such books as 
Dr. Barbour’s or do they often achieve such 
careers as Dr. Whyte’s,” I threw back. 


“Don’t be flippant,” said the Lion. “I might 
193 





194 Tur Lion 1n His Den 





mean either or both. As a matter of fact I do 
mean do men often find themselves as completely 
and potently in the pulpit as did this great Scot- 
tish leader?” 

“Not too often I fear,” I replied, “but after all 
most men do not have a biographer, not to speak 
of such a biographer, and each in his own order 
and each according to his own powers, many, many 
men do right valiant and creditable and potent 
service in the pulpit.” 

The Lion listened quietly. ‘Then with a quick 
movement of his head and a certain bright eager- 
ness in his expression, he spoke again. 

“But you know I never really knew Dr. Whyte 
before. I had heard him at Free Saint George’s 
in Edinburgh. I knew that no one else in the 
Athens of the North or anywhere else for that 
matter could speak to the conscience as did he. I 
had chuckled over the saying going about Edin- 
burgh when Dr. Hugh Black was with him at Free 
Saint George’s: ‘Dr. Whyte preaches black in the 
morning, and Dr. Black preaches white at night.’ 
It seemed then that it was prophetic fire in the 
morning and sweetness and light at night. But 
I did not know what a humanist Dr. Whyte was 
with his appreciation of Cicero and Quintillian. 
Somehow, no one told me how he defended Robert- 
son Smith at the great heresy trial. I quite missed 


CONSCIENCE AND TASTE °< 195 


his appreciation of Cardinal Newman and his in- 
terpretation of that mystic who sought rest in 
Rome to Scottish Presbyterianism. And—well 
there were no end of things I did not know, which 
speak right to one’s mind and heart. They are 
all here in this living, interpreting biography. I 
feel as if I had been living with Alexander Whyte 
himself. How he combined things you do not 
often find together !” 

The Lion paused. 

“Yes,” he went on, “that is just what I want 
to say. He gloriously combined things you de 
not often find together. Why do not more 
preachers do it?” 

“Why do not more men do it?” I countered. 

And the Lion smiled in his friendly fashion as 
I went out of the room. 


CHAPTER L 


GETTING ACQUAINTED WitH THE REPUBLIC 


asked the Lion. 
“Why do over again what Columbus 
did with fair completeness at the close of the 
fifteenth century?” I returned. 

“Don’t be absurdly literal,” objected the Lion. 
“If I may say so, you are never less impressive 
than when you pretend not to understand what, 
as a matier of fact, you comprehend very well.” 

“My natural honesty interfermg with my 
mental agility,” I added. 

The Lion smiled a little sardonically. 

“TI have known people who tried to turn a per- 
sonal limitation into something admirable by at- 
tiring it in a neat little ethical dress. But to re- 
turn to America, which is just what you have just 
done, you know it as a matter of geography, you 
know something of its history, you know some of 
the people who live in it. But have you ever 
really seen it. Have you seen it as some gifted 


Greek saw fifth century Athens in sudden joy, and 
196 


“| ie you ever discovered America,” 


GetTtTinec AcauaInTeD WitH THE Repusric 197 


then straightway set about making more real what 
he saw?” 

“T don’t know whether I have seen the America 
of which you are talking at the moment,” I ad- 
mitted. “After all, there are a good many 
Americas you know.” 

“J mean for one thing,” said my friend, “the 
America which offers the greatest literary oppor- 
tunity which has ever come to man in one place 
and at one time in all the world.” 

“How do you make that out,” I inquired scep- 
tically. “I have heard, you know, of a gifted man 
named Dante, who was born just in time to make 
a thousand years of Europe vivid and articulate. 
Do you think our opportunity equals his? I have 
heard of another gifted man named William 
Shakespeare, who was born when a breath of 
astounding vitality came to England and who 
with the love of beauty of the renaissance and the 
conscience which the reformation was already put- 
ting into the heart of many a man to whose head 
it had not given a creed, wrote about human life 
and its glory and shame and all the drama of its 
baffling motives and its powerful action as no one 
had written before. Do you think our oppor- 
tunity equals his?” 

“Stop making periodic sentences where history 


9 


198 Tue Lion 1x His DEN 


poses as criticism, and give a man a chance,” cried 
the Lion. | 

“History always is criticism,” I insisted. “But 
goon. State your thesis and defend it.” | 

“I mean this,” said my friend. And his eyes 
were shining curiously and his voice rang with a 
sort of magnetic energy. “The very genius of 
literature has to do with comparison and contrast. 
The briefest definition of literature is the seeing 
of something in the terms of something else and 
the telling of what you see in appropriate speech 
rising to beauty as the feeling of similarity or 
contrast becomes intense. All good writing comes 
to some form of metaphor or simile at last. You 
only see a thing effectively as you see it in the 
terms of something else. And when the joy of 
what you detect in that moment creates bright 
and living phrases, you have, in so far as it 1s all 
honest and authentic, real literature.” 

“And what has all this to do with America?” I 
asked. 

“It has everything to do with America,” said 
the Lion. ‘Before the war a million people were 
entering America every year seeking to find 
homes. One man of every hundred you met had 
arrived within a year. ‘Two men out of every 
two hundred. They came from everywhere. 
They represented all the races. They illustrated 


b 


GetTTinc ACQUAINTED WitH THE REpusuic 199 


every sort of tradition. And here they were 
jostled and beaten together to make the future 
American life. If anybody had eyes to see at all, 
there never was such a story to tell. All other 
contrasts fade beside it. Any one of our cities 
contains material for a new literary tapestry of 
life with all the similarities and contrasts of the 
human story found in one great palpitating mass. 
To understand it and to describe it is to help all 
these people to come to terms with their own en- 
vironment and with each other. Nobody has 
understood it. Nobody has described it. Why 
not discover America?” 


CHAPTER LI 
History AS INTERPRETATION 


Y friend was rather restlessly moving his 
hand about among the group of volumes 
easily within his reach, as I entered the 

room. 
_ “When is history not a history?” he enquired 
half irritably. 

‘When it is an uninspired classification of un- 
digested source materials,” I replied making a 
rather hideously jumbled sentence. 

“Your meaning is better than your diction,” 
said the Lion. “Of course one must never speak 
disrespectfully of patient and painstaking scholar- 
ship, which keeps its microscope bent with untir- 
ing perseverance upon even the most unpromising 
details. It is like being ironic about foundations 
and still wanting palatial houses. But after all 
a foundation is not a house. And my objection to 
certain chaps is not that they know how to classify 
source materials. It is that they know nothing 
else. After all John Fiske has to come along to 
deal with all the historical brochures left by pa- 

200 


History as INTERPRETATION 201 


tient investigators at John Hopkins University 
before record is turned into history. I’m not 
impatient with the work of the investigators. But 
I want a few more of the Fiskes.” 

“How are you going to get them?” I enquired. 

“Now, there is a question,” said the Lion. “Of 
course one would need to change some matters 
which are very fundamental in education. We 
have developed a system which produces human ~ 
adding machines rather than men of culture, and 
men of detailed technical knowledge rather than 
men of ripe and mellow erudition.” 

“Why not do both,” I enquired. 

“Precisely,” said my friend. “I gladly admit 
that we must do just that. But the first step is 
the definite discovery that there is such a thing 
as erudition, such a thing as rich and gracious 
and glowing culture.” 

‘And how are you going to get at it,” I asked. 

“Well, not being an educator, I would begin 
by attacking the reading of the public rather than 
the curriculum of the school, though I would like 
to do both. I would charge every young person 
who is a reader to devour no end of biographies 
of men who have succeeded in every sort of field. 
So human values would emerge. And I would ad- 
vise him to read and read again the books which 
see in history something deeper than the working 


202 Tue Lion 1n His DEN 


out of an atomic theory of human relation- 
ships.” 

The Lion paused to pick a book off the table. 
‘‘Here, for instance, is Dr. Shailer Matthews’s 
volume of Harvard Lectures “The Spiritual In- 
terpretation of History.” Dr. Matthews is a com- 
petent scholar. You will find his book on the 
French Revolution included in pretty much every 
bibliography of the period. He is a man whose 
fertile mind ranges over large fields. His students 
know him for the flash and thrust of his darting 
sentences. He brings an elastic and agile as well 
as a highly trained instrument of thought to all 
his tasks. And with all his knowledge of tech- 
nique he is conscious of larger and more far- 
reaching values. If every young man who is 
specializing in history could get the truth which 
Dr. Shailer Matthews has packed into his Har- 
vard lectures completely assimilated in his own 
mind we would have a group of powerful his- 
torians who would give us books which added to 
their technical scholarship a spiritual insight, 
which would lift them from the realm of catalogues 
into the realm of historical literature.” 

“Providing they know how to write,” I supple- 
mented. 

“Yes,” admitted the Lion, “somebody would 
have to teaeh them how to write.” 


CHAPTER LII 
A Quiet Evenine 


HERE was a bright blaze in the big fire- 
place. And from his comfortable couch the 
Lion was gazing into the heart of the flame. 
There was no other light in the room. And his 
face in the lovely glow of the fire had a singularly 
arresting spiritual .beauty. The freshness of 
youth was gone, and the fine features which had 
always expressed such distinction and grace, had 
changed and mellowed with the years. There 
was the story of pain and struggle and victory on 
that face. And quietly resting there one saw a 
great peace. 

The Lion’s eyes were glowing with an inner fire 
which seemed to answer the blaze upon which he 
was gazing. His hands moved quietly over three 
books on the little table beside his couch. 

“I’ve been living with Sainte-Beuve again,” he 
said softly, as if the words brought back happy 
memories. “I began a good many years ago in 
Paris with all the subtle flavor of the city whetting 
my appetite. The Causeries du Lundi really 


marked an epoch in my life. They taught me in 
203 


904 Tuer Lion 1n His Den 





a fashion I had never understood before what a 
subtly understanding and interpreting thing criti- 
cism might be. The other day someone brought 
in these three volumes of English translations of 
essays by Sainte-Beuve edited by William Sharp. 
I have read the three, and by a fine magic I have 
gone from America and from the traditions of 
English-speaking men and women and have en- 
tered into the Latin mood so superbly expressed 
by the great essayist. His portrait galleries 
never can hold their heroes and heroines. They 
walk right out of their frames into your mind and 
often into your heart. He captures everything: 
ideas, individual qualities, social atmosphere. And 
he portrays and estimates and interprets with a 
fine urbanity and a warm and gracious justice.” 
The Lion was quite silent for a while. Then his 
voice took on a more intimate quality. 
‘Sainte-Beuve is a keen and interested specta- 
tor more than participant—at least so you feel 
though you know the influence he exerted as a 
critic. And when I had to learn how to be a 
spectator my mind went back again and again 
to Sainte-Beuve. Somehow he taught me that to 
survey and to understand is to be a part of life 
after all. Milton did not give me quite what I 
needed with his great line, ‘They also serve who 
only stand and wait.’ Sainte-Beuve made me feel 


A Quiet Evenine 205 


the glory of the mind which does not have to stand 
and wait though the body is caught in the 
clutches of ugly circumstance. And at last I 
learned that there are secrets which are only re- 
vealed to the brooding mind thrust apart from 
the fevered heat of the life of action. Of course 
it was in the New Testament and not in the writ- 
ings of the great French essayist that I found the 
power to go on. But if it was the Man of the 
Gospels who gave me a moral reconciliation to the 
life I had to live, I needed an intellectual technique 
for the long days and nights and years. And so 
when Sainte-Beuve taught me how great a thing 
it is just to survey and to understand he put me 
greatly in his debt.” 

The fire was burning more quietly now. There 
were shadows as well as lights upon the Lion’s 
face. 

We sat for a while in complete silence. Then I 
followed my friend’s eyes as they moved lovingly 
among the shelves packed with books on every 
wall of the big and hearty room. Every human 
civilization and every human type was repre- 
sented. In this room my friend demonstrated his 
cosmopolitan sympathy, his citizenship in the 
whole world. His eyes seemed gathering the es- 
sence of the whole collection as they passed from 
shelf to shelf: books from ancient, medieval, and 


206 Tur Lion 1n His Den 


modern times, books from every land where books 
have been written, history and biography, philos- 
ophy and poetry, fiction and drama, essays and 
dissertations. ‘The ages seemed alive in the room 
which might have been a prison, but which the 
Lion had made as large as the world. 

“You have to have them all,’”’ he said musingly, 
with a little gesture which included his whole col- 
lection of books. There were photographs here 
and there of lads to whom he had given encourage- 
ment and friendship through all his years as a 
prisoner of pain. ‘They too represented many 
nations and many races. I thought of the lads 
from China and Japan and India and Africa who 
had found in this room something priceless and 
perpetually enriching. 

And now we both seemed to want the happy 
and fruitful experience of friendly silence. Long 
ago we had learned to think together without 
words. 

The embers in the fireplace were burning very 
low when the Lion roused himself. There was a 
curious combination of completed renunciation 
and joyous satisfaction in his words as he said: 

“It has not been too bad.” 

He waited a moment and then he added. 

“In fact it has been very good indeed.” 

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